I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace.
In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit.
If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding. Yes, the bill goes to the car owner, but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes. It is reasonable to place requirements on the determination of speed-limits and camera-locations to prevent abuse. Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
With no attack on the parent, this reminds me of the general driving attitude of South Africa where I am from. A combination of lack of road enforcement and public mistrust in the police have created an environment where the rule of law on the road, designed to protect lives, is treated merely as suggestions or guidelines, often ignored.
It’s extremely common to see drivers speeding from 10 to even 30 km/h above the speed limit, even on urban roads. Sometimes these drivers are so confident in their right (freedom?) that they’ll flash their lights at you from behind if you’re going too slow, even if you are a good citizen driving at the speed limit. And speeding is only one half of it...
When I came to Europe for the first time it was amazing to see how almost everyone respects the road rules (I know this isn’t the case everywhere) and it generally makes me feel much safer on the roads. Although it’s still scary as hell cycling in some cities without protected cycle lanes.
Depends on the state & locality. Places like Virginia where having a radar detector is illegal (and the police have detector-detectors) and going 20mph over (32kph) or faster than 80mph (128kph)[0], gets you charged with reckless driving which is a criminal offense punishable by time in jail. So only the foolhardy speed there.
In next-door North Carolina, going 9mph over (14kph) will only get you insurance points not license points (the state tracks them separately) so many drivers limit themselves to that on the interstates, and sometimes 5mph over (8kph) inside city limits.
[0] Highway SH-130 outside Austin Texas has the fastest speed limit in the US at 85mph (136kph). So what is safe & legal there can get you placed in handcuffs in Virginia.
This is part of my problem with speed cameras everywhere. I respect the idea, but speed limits many places are too low given that roads and vehicles have improved significantly and they have not changed much to keep up. I would be all for more appropriate speed limits and better enforcement of speeding - and congesting traffic by failure to yield to faster drivers behind you.
While car safety has improved[1], for places where people still walk regularly like NY and Boston, going way over the speed limit is dangerous to people that don't happen to be in cars.
Yes. Any conversation like this can be expanded, because limits are only one tool among many that need to work together, and changes in each location need to be evaluated case by case - where divided roads / freeways would be the primary beneficiaries. But that article indicated the larger problem even in the city was infrastructure design and people exceeding speed limits rather than the limits themselves.
In places where we now have a 25 mph speed limit, if modern tech proves able to reduce accidents by 95% because of accident intervention tech / fsd etc in 5-10 years, should we raise the speed limit to 35 even though the accidents would then be more dangerous to pedestrians? Surely the answer in some cases would be yes, and others no. Or since most people drive above 25 anyways right now, should we just increase the limit now and increase enforcement and penalties? These are the types of changes I am proposing, as well as reducing the incentive to speed due to frustrated drivers passing road hogs unsafely, etc by enforcing minimum speeds and requiring courtesy yields as well. Just because you are driving slow does not mean you are not part of the problem.
And I think SA is a whole other level of breaking laws.
Anecdotal: Coming from Northern Europe (Denmark), I found people in NYC, Boston, SF , and LA to drive very well-behaved compared to people back home. I had to take care to stop driving like a European, since it made my fellow American passengers cringe.
I lived and worked — and drove — in Belgium for almost eight years. I held my own in France and a Italy, too. When I moved back to the US, it took me a little while to accommodate, but not too long.
But to this day, when necessary, I can go back into Belgian mode, and drive like the other crazy-ass Texans here in Austin.
> but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera.
I understand they’ll take pictures of the front of the vehicle and check against who’s lives at the registered address. Not sure if it’s an infraction for the registered owner to refuse to identify the likely driver.
Source: my German car rental company didn’t auto-pay anything, they forwarded me a “ticket” from the police department asking me to pay 20 EUR to go away or they’ll try to identify the actual driver and try to charge them a higher fine.
While this is more work, I think it’s reasonable for us to expect law enforcement to identify the guilty and not just convict someone that’s easy to blame.
Even better: in Germany, the cameras black out the passenger's side of the car automatically for privacy reasons, so that only the driver is identified.
This was a problem in 2008 when a car with steering wheel on the right systematically got caught speeding. The driver knew full well what was going on an placed a muppet in the passeger's seat. The picture is fantastic:
This is funny, but in repeated cases the authorities would require the car owner to keep a driving log for that car. So this wouldn't work for very long.
At that time, British and Irish governments didn't share licence plate ownership data with their continental European counterparts. German authorities couldn't trace the owner of the car without a physical stop. Situation has changed in recent years and I understand that now the data is exchanged.
In Washington State they go one step further: cameras can only take pictures from the rear. They're not allowed to actually take a picture of the driver.
Yes (same in Ontario, Canada generally). The owner gets the civil fine, but there are no demerit points put on anyone's license.
If one is pulled over for speeding (or anything else), then the officer can identify the driver and they get points as well.
I think points are used as an (dis)incentive for people who would be otherwise be willing to just cut a cheque. Too many points and you start getting insurance problems.
German here. Indeed only the driver of a car is punished for speeding. The burdon is on the officials to determine the driver. But they will send an official inquiry to the car owner to name the driver of the car, if the identification is not obvious by a photo. There are cases where no one gets the ticket, because the driver is not named by the car owner, sometimes for very valid reason. With a larger group of people having access to that car, this can be true. As a consequence, sometimes people get off their ticket.
There is a catch however: while you might get out of a ticket once or twice, the authorities can order you to keep a drivers log in the car. That means, a written log of every single drive has to be kept. So that there is never any ambiguity of naming drivers going forward. And having to keep logs of all your drives going forward is something you really want to avoid.
In other European countries where it's also illegal to just fine the owner rather than the actual driver, the police sends an official inquiry about who was driving the car at the time. Providing false information or refusing to provide information at all is punishable by law, you have to name someone and take responsibility for the veracity of that information. The owner is legally responsible for knowing who is driving their car at all times, with the exception of the car being stolen.
In practice this just leads to a lot of penalty points or license suspensions for the 80 year old (grand)parents, or anyone who has a license but never drives.
Sweden: it’s not possible to charge an owner for a crime, only the driver. It’s also not a crime to not name the driver.
If a speed camera photo is blurry or dark (like in a place with darkness most of the year) the case is as far as I know closed and no inquiry is made.
If I realize too late that I’m going to speed past a traffic cam then I usually just hold my hand up near the wind screen to cover my face and the risk of a ticket would be nearly zero.
There has been talk of making it an administrative fee rather than a crime (like parking tickets) which would make it possible to attribute to cars and not owners.
Seems weird to me, as someone who’s used to the UK system of photo from the back and the owner being responsible for identification of the driver, that people hadn’t already figured this one out :)
Oh I totally agree the Finnish way makes far more sense in terms of accountability and process.
Just was wondering that, if you were the sort of person who habitually broke the limit and didn’t much care for the dangers, wearing PPE might have already become part of every drive, regardless of the pandemic situation.
In Israel, it is up to the owner of the car to name the driver (or accept responsibility) if no other evidence is available.
Rental companies name the renter, which is what you describe, and it is then up to the renter to accept or name a sub-lesser; by default, the responsible party is the latest to accept, or for court to determine (but that would likely require dissenting potential drivers to file legal complaints against each other)
Occasionally, people use this to equalize penalty points in a household (say, married couples) because other than fines, there’s a point system where 3-5 nontrivial tickets in as many years will get your license suspended or revoked for a while, and other sanctions.
This practice - admitting a crime you didn’t commit - is of course illegal, and not very prevalent - but there have been a few high profile cases involving famous (and infamous) people caught doing that.
> Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera.
-Same in Norway - ticket is sent to registered owner by default, if s/he contests the claim, s/he is summoned to the local police and shown the photo. If s/he claims not to know who drove the car or refuse to identify the driver, the police may investigate if it's a slow day in the office - say, call you for a formal interrogation (during which you are legally obliged to provide truthful answers or else get slapped for obstruction of justice), compare the speedcam photo to other members of your household &c.
In short, the owner of the vehicle will never be on the hook for a speeding ticket with unknown driver - but is required to assist the police in finding out who the offender is.
Two identical twins back where I grew up claimed to have gamed this system on numerous occasions - claiming they couldn't remember which brother had driven the car on the day in question.
After all, refusing to cooperate is a crime. Not remembering isn't.
In San Francisco they intimidate you and claim you’re legally obligated to tell them who was driving.
They did this to me when someone ran a red light in a car I’d sold (and electronically transferred) six months prior.
I’d suspect what they did wouldn’t hold up in court if it weren’t for the fact that the San Francisco court house was engaged in this behavior.
Apparently, this scenario is so common in California that places that accept cars as donations often have a specialist to help donors deal with extortion demands over revenue tickets.
As long as we are talking about a speeding ticket, you are correct. But since around 2017 it is a crime to conduct an illegal road race. This covers extreme cases of speeding with quite harsh punishments: impounding of the vehicle, high fines or jail time for the driver - and the owner if the owner could have reasonably suspected that the driver was about to do it.
In Alberta, Canada, speed camera tickets are treated more like parking tickets (at least last time I checked which was quite a while ago). They are issued to the owner of the car. There are no license penalty points, however, as they don't even attempt to identify the driver.
My state in Australia have heavy, heavy fines, even compared to the rest of Aus. It doesn't reduce the amount of poor driving but speeding at least is unambiguous. There is no grey area. If the speed limit is 60kmph then you will get booked for exceeding it by 5kmph, and the only reason you get that 5kmph leeway is to account for camera calibration and some grace for speedometer calibration. They would ping you at 61kmph if they could
We also have demerit points, so if you get caught speeding say three times in a row you will most likely have ran out of points on your license and automatically get a 3 to 6 month license suspension. Most of this is automated, so you may find out you were suspended by getting pulled over before the letter arrives. It's all very strict.
I think that's stupid for one reason. As an engineer I often considered 10% tolerance to be sufficient. I think enforcing speed limits to anything greater than 10% is just silly. I often drift +/- more than 10% of my intended speed. It's just human nature. I pay more attention to potential dangers and obstacles, and less on whether I am within a % of the speed limit, and I really hope other drivers do as well.
Ignoring whether it’s “human nature” to vary by that much, the remedy is simple: in a 60mph limit (the clue is in the name), target 54. +/-10% is now 48.6-59.4, instead of 54-66. It’s within the speed limit, and a smaller absolute speed differential between lowest and highest speed.
Similar arguments have been made against average speed cameras on UK motorways - “I’ll have to be entirely focused on the speedo the whole time!”. No, you just drive within the speed limit.
Interestingly, you'll fail your UK motorcycle test if you don't largely treat the speed limit as a target.
If you stick at 40mph or thereabouts going into a 50mph zone, the examiner may think you haven't seen the speed limit change. More importantly, if you don't keep up a good pace on a clear country road with good visibility where the speed limit is 60mph, they won't have confidence in your riding at higher speeds, and they know - as all bikers know - that you will almost certainly spend a good chunk of your riding career at higher speeds on country roads.
They do have to check whether you are able to confidently, safely and within the bounds of traffic-rules, operate the vehicle close to the speed limits. This need not be taken to mean that one has to always ride close to the limit.
Of course, given that on two wheels, one is not as safe as on four (and also being enclosed in a metal frame). So, naturally the good riders will find ways to ride safely and that includes riding at appropriate speeds. The ones who aren't good/safe riders are not likely to ride for long.
The reasoning I see is that objects moving at the same speed in the same direction tend not to collide.
I have seen advice to motorcyclists that they should be just a bit faster than most traffic. Slow enough to manage changes in traffic ahead, but fast enough that no one is approaching you from behind.
Platitudes like this and the evergreen "speed kills" can themselves be dangerous.
Obviously driving at the speed limit all the time is not a legal requirement and there will be times when driving slower is appropriate. However, driving far slower than the speed limit for no good reason when there is other traffic around can itself increase the risk of something bad happening, because you won't be keeping up with the flow of traffic and behaving as other drivers will expect.
My suggestion for someone having difficulty keeping their speed in a 20% window was to aim 6 mph slower at highway speeds. That doesn’t constitute “far slower”.
In the Uk, if you are incapable of handling your car on a highway with other vehicles driving 12mph slower than the limit, then you are incapable of driving on highways - some vehicles e.g. HGVs are restricted to these lower speeds.
An unfortunate extension of this is that sometimes, a speed limit will be set very low for no apparent reason, and almost everyone will exceed it significantly if it's not visibly being enforced. This puts a driver who wants to be both safe and legal in a no-win situation.
Personally, I liked the idea put forward by one of the UK driver advocacy groups a long time ago. Speed enforcement measures should prioritise places with a dangerous hazard, and there should be prominent warning signs on approach in a standard format that show (a) the speed camera sign, (b) the current speed limit and (c) the nature of the hazard, so drivers understand why the limit is there and enforcement is visible and clearly justified.
Somehow, I suspect that if drivers had more trust that speed limits were being set appropriately and expected that they would actually be enforced where they most matter, they would become largely self-policing anyway. Then the actual road police could spend more time dealing with other problems like using a phone behind the wheel or drinking and driving, which are potentially more dangerous than most speeding but much more difficult to enforce without human intervention.
Risk compensation [0] is a relevant idea here. When you give people a highway they will treat it like one. If you want them to slow down, you have to make a road that feels slower. Tighter corners, narrower lanes, parked cars, bulb-outs, etc.
In suburban development especially, there is/was an initiative to make roads safer by increasing the physical tolerances relative to the posted limits. So you have all these residential neighborhoods with big gentle corners in them that any drunk idiot in a shitbox could easily handle at 60mph. And that is exactly what happens.
If 30mph is too fast for a pedestrian encounter, then 30mph needs to feel too fast for maintaining control / avoiding obstacles.
Designing road systems to encourage an appropriate driving style is valuable. Some non-traditional arrangements have been used to very good effect here in the UK in recent years, though personally I'd say the experiments have had mixed success overall and we've had our share of well-intentioned changes for the worse as well.
That said, it's also important to use these design techniques for clear reasons. Some people don't like motor vehicles and want to deter their use for reasons other than safety. They have been known to argue for road designs that limit capacity or force traffic to go very slowly as a deterrent measure, when perhaps a road designed to support faster speeds could have been just as safe and allowed a more efficient transport system. Sometimes, they even argue for measures that would likely be counterproductive given their stated goals, possibly without understanding why that would be the result. So before you can design a road, you first need to establish what your requirements are and what you're trying to achieve, which is more of a political question than an engineering one.
In particularly walkable cities you can see the extreme end of this in the way barriers are removed from between driving and walking parts of the road, and the driving parts are made narrower. Drivers take much greater caution and are forced to pay attention. Contrast to a wide asphalt road with sidewalks on the side, drivers feel separated from foot traffic and thus safe in their speeds and lose focus, even though they likely couldn't stop in time for a hazard even if they were paying attention.
Many American highways actually increase the length and size of the road markings in order to make speed feel slower than it actually is, which was likely a comfort thing at first but clearly it hides the present danger of speed.
I have never been on a busy motorway with everyone driving at or above the speed limit. Car drivers always vary between 55 and 70(+), and heavier vehicles are frequently as slow as 50. That is not a hazard. It would be a hazard were they to drive in the wrong lane, or fail to merge, but that’s a totally separate issue to the steady-state-avoid-speed-cameras which I was replying to.
This tends to be my rule of thumb. Speed Limit +10% assuming good conditions. It keeps me from being a hazard when other drivers wish to go faster while pretty closely adhering to the whole point of speed limits. 7 mph over the limit on the freeway is still pretty safe. 7 mph over on a narrow residential street can be quite dangerous.
This rule of thumb means I really don't have to waste any mental energy keeping an eye out for police, since someone else is almost always going faster and I find it doesn't significantly impact my trip times since traffic and stop lights tend to cancel out most potential gains from driving any faster.
Speed limiters and cruise control are pretty common in modern cars. You can set your mental intended speed lower and won't drift as much. This is from experience of switching to a car with speed notification beeper (very low tech) - it took maybe 2 weeks to stop drifting over almost completely without paying extra attention. We ended up treating it as a game with gf - shortest time for a 300km drive with no beeps.
I have a modern car. 2015 Kia Optima, and it has basic cruise control. I don't know what conditions you're driving in, but I think it's fucking scary to drive with it on unless there's a completely open highway in front of me. Not controlling my own following distance feels like I'm about to hit the car in front of me at any given moment, especially on a road where the speed limit is 75mph and you have people going anything from 60-90mph.
Never heard of a speed limiter. As you can probably tell from the "freedom units," I'm from the US if that matters.
I pop the cruise control on lots, especially on motorways. If I get too close To car in front I’ll touch the break, but even in the U.K. roads are rarely that variable - especially near the speed limit.
The cruise control has a switch to change to limiter, I rarely use that.
Adaptive CC - yes, pretty much all the time. I understand it would be super annoying to use basic CC in the city. But that's where you can set the limiter instead (they often come together with CC).
Australia is the most nanny state country that I know of. The driving rules are absolutely draconian. In fact when I was growing up there, I was baffled at how aggressive the enforcement was, while at the same time the general level of driving ability was so low. Would you like to be responsible and have a designated driver to drive your inebriated friends home safely? Nope. Not allowed. Drivers on their L or P plates are not allowed to have other people in the car at night. It's ridiculous.
Indeed — Brit-turned-Aussie here — the drivers here are absolutely atrocious.
I often say that Brits can be pretty rude until they get behind the wheel, whereupon they turn in to gracious, giving angels. Australians directly mirror this: in person, they’re adorable, yet behind the wheel they’re selfish monsters.
I hate driving in this country. So much so that I don’t own a car.
I had the exact opposite experience with Aussie drivers - with the exceptions of taxi drivers, who were the absolute worst, it was always easy to merge lanes, noone driving too dangerous or fast.
I live and drive in Australia and find people polite and decent in all my commuting or country roadtrips. I swear it's improved over the years. There used to be more selfish driving, but there's always someone pausing to let you merge or flash you to continue if you both reach a narrow point.
Oh sorry, I meant in that they transform people's personalities. I am a low car use enthusiast as well, although I do own one it is mostly for motorsport.
They only target low effort enforcement like red lights and speed, and I think our license program is good now but the majority of the people got their licenses before that, with a couple of bucks and an hour or two with an instructor.
Then they have already subtracted their margin of error, which is definitely above 2km/h.
More likely they saw e.g 66km/h in a speed gun with 4km/h error, so they know you did at least 62, and can book you stating 62. But most likely you were doing 66 or even 70 then.
In NZ, which generally copy-pastes VIC's traffic laws, the tolerance is only applied to automated systems like speed cameras. A cop can ticket you in-person when you're 1km/h over.
Yep! I got a fine for 15 over in Vic in an 80 to 60km zone transition and I was absolutely delighted by the fine. Only $230! Would have been $700ish in SA if I am not mistaken. That is ~$550 USD and 9mph over for anyone curious.
I’ll assume you aren’t in the U.K. (which this article is about), because the U.K. system is almost exactly as you describe!
> Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
Uk has a combination of:
* Average speed cameras (as per the Norway example)
* Variable speed cameras (where the speed limit varies depending on the conditions of the road and congestion)
* Fixed speed cameras (traditional speed cameras dug in next to a road)
* Mobile speed cameras (as per the bbc article, with a purpose to make sure the position changes each day so locals don’t know where the cameras are).
> These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding.
Traffic stops in the U.K. are very rare, and even mobile cameras just send the documentation to your registered address with no stop. A stop would only be done in the U.K. if there was a belief that the driving was putting others at immediate risk (eg appears drunk).
As opposed to the U.S., where parked highway patrol cars conceal themselves in blinds where you can't see them until they've already clocked your speed. Most Americans believe they have a quota of speeding tickets that must be met.
There are some incredibly forward thinking laws here. Non-compete being illegal, lane splitting for motorcycles is explicitly legal, etc. Of course, tons of stupidity too.
They're focussed on the heavily used sections though, ie where they are more likely to be encountered. By that measure (kms driven), they're much more common.
In 10+ years of driving in the UK, the only time I got caught speeding was in France! Oh, and once in New Zealand. I see signs for the the UK average speed cameras all over the place, but I guess they're tuned to only trigger for vehicles that are significantly exceeding the limit?
"A friend" drove a (non-UK reg) car from Glasgow to Southampton last year, significantly exceeding the speed limit most of the way and maintaining >90mph for multiple hours, and wondered if speeding tickets would later arrive in the post. Nothing ever happened. I can only guess that speed camera tickets are only sent to UK registered vehicles? That's a pretty big loophole.
I don't drive like this in France, they will stop you and my understanding is you must pay the fine on the spot or they arrest you and tow your car.
I've got another bit of anecdata like that - know a guy who never changed the plates on his French registered van.
Had the misfortune of going somewhere with him once and he was doing 80mph in a 50mph average speed camera bit of motorway - said the police never bother to chase up foreign plates so he just sped everywhere and never got a fine.
It’s on the anti-clockwise part when the limit drops from 70 to 50 round the bend. I got caught at 60, showing how little attention I was paying to the speed limit (I was preoccupied with the tailgater)
"un-sporting"? It's not a game. It's about reducing the most common cause of preventable death. The harms to privacy or "freedom" or whatnot are more defensible here than pretty much anywhere else.
In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents, way below “driver didn’t look properly”, which was 9 times as common.
As far as deaths go, the most common contributory causes are loss of control and failure to look properly. Exceeding speed limit was a cause in just 16% of deaths.
> In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents
That may be in part due to camera-based enforcement of the speed limits.
Also, road accidents kill quite a lot of people. If it's the 10th most common cause, that could still be enough to kill more people than many other things that we regulate.
> > In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents
> That may be in part due to camera-based enforcement of the speed limits.
I can't lay my hands on it now, but there are studies measuring the effect on road casualties before and after camera installations. A lot of the time there's no difference.
Like any punishment/deterrent, people aren't caught often enough for this to work.
If you drive around for long enough in the UK, you'll notice that speeding is actually pretty common. However, it's not the case that everyone speeds everywhere, you're far more likely to catch someone speeding on the motorway or an NSL A road in the clear and dry than in a 20 outside a school. This is because most people are competent enough to regulate their speed appropriately for the environment. Sometimes it's riskier to drive at 20mph past a school than it is to do 90 on the motorway.
Of course there are people who drive dangerously around vulnerable people and in hazardous situations and these are the people who often end up contributing to the statistics. Those are the people enforcement needs to focus on.
> Also, road accidents kill quite a lot of people. If it's the 10th most common cause, that could still be enough to kill more people than many other things that we regulate.
The problem with this is that if we were serious about making the roads safer with the limited resources we have, we wouldn't spend it on catching people speeding. We'd spend it on stuff that actually makes a difference.
It could be. I lack the data at the moment but I seem to remember when deaths were higher 20 years ago (3400 a year vs 1700), exceeding the speed limit was higher in the causes.
What cameras may have done is change the culture of speeding, making it far more antisocial - like the drunk driving campaigns did.
If others don’t speed, then you generally can’t speed, especially in towns where it’s most dangerous.
My parents used to speed all over the place in the 90s, my peers don’t today. Perhaps the cameras don’t make any local difference, but are part of a larger cultural shift.
More people are killed by car drivers knocking down pedestrians than by car drivers speeding.
I wonder if speeding is correlated with those other causes of accidents. It may not always be the cause of accidents but is evidence of bad judgement and easy to detect. In an ideal world we could also catch people who fail to check their blind spot, or get distracted automatically.
Also, it does make the environment less hospitable for pedestrians and cyclists which is a good enough reason alone.
Judgement is subjective. I would argue that the safest way to drive is conservatively and with caution. And that your own emotions, time constraints, and judgement about safety are not sufficiently compelling to override that.
Of course as a society we are forced to strike a balance between safety and utility. Where you strike that balance is political and not entirely objective.
It is completely possible to drive conservatively and with caution, while exceeding an arbitrary limit. Here's one for you, a 3-lane highway adjacent to a shopping centre and school. The 60km/h speed limit is too high during shopping & school hours, but stupidly low at 3am on a clear night with no traffic around. My opinion of a safe speed is very different for those 2 circumstances - I don't see how that equates to bad judgement.
"Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful"
It isn't wonderful at all. UK has average speed cameras as well and they are horrible. Every time I drive in average speed zones I spend more time looking down because
1) I don't want to go 5mi over the speed limit because I will get fined otherwise
2) I don't want to go 5mi below the speed limit because then drivers behind me have to break one by one which eventually causes a traffic jam
3) I can't overtake a lorry going 65 because it would take me too long and I might miss my exit, which then makes anxious because I have to extend my commute time if I get stuck behind one
4) I can't safely let people merge onto the motorway because if I speed up or slow down then 1) or 2) happen
5) I can't calculate my average speed and to avoid 1) and 2) I have to keep looking down not paying much attention to what's going on around me
This only works on roads with little traffic, like in Scotland, where you can set cruise control and drive for miles. It doesn't work in Cambridge where AADT is ten times higher.
"These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding."
You are comparing average speed cameras to traffic stops, rather than stationary speed traps...
"Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes."
No because the primary reason for speed cameras is ensuring road safety, not generating revenue in which case you are encouraging installing speed cameras where they are not required. Speed cameras are not as safe you believe they are, otherwise they would be installed every 100 metres.
"Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed."
That's like saying "if you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy" using the same "don't do the crime, if you can't do the time" principle, which is flawed. There are plenty of situations where you would want to occasionally speed 10% over the speed limit, but that's not equal to speeding 100% over the speed limit for a very long time. Both will get you a fine. It's not as simple as black or white.
'Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.'
Seems odd to me that Govt's struggle to raise revenue via normal taxes when they have a large pool of stupid people they could raise extra money from? Maybe making a regualr speeding fine a life changing amount rather than the negligable sum it is now would improve people's behaviour, raise some much needed revenue and save a few lives too?
> Seems odd to me that Govt's struggle to raise revenue via normal taxes when they have a large pool of stupid people they could raise extra money from?
Extracting money from drivers was one of the causes of community tension in Fergusson.
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
> Maybe making a regualr speeding fine a life changing amount rather than the negligable sum it is now would improve people's behaviour, raise some much needed revenue and save a few lives too
The fine is negligible if you are well off. It isn't if you aren't. If you get points (for SP-30), the increase in insurance is about £300-400. So the actual cost of the fine is closer to £400-500 which is the rent for the month.
There has already been talk of making the fine be adjusted to how much you earn.
I personally am aware of many people that were speeding at well over 100mph. When they went to the majestrate they were let off with 6 points. People get away with things that should get them a suspension all the time.
A friend of mine was traveling across france on a motorcycle (this was decades ago) and one day had to get home to england quite quickly. So he got on the tollway and went quickly. But apparently they checked entrance and exit times on the tickets and would calculate your speed, so he "lost" his ticket and paid the max cost to be safe. I guess it worked.
There are a lot of automatic speed radars (at a single point), and a bit fewer average speed radars but they work over a few km at most (and don't interact with the toll).
He told me they check the entrance time on the ticket and when you get off at the exit they know approximately how long it should take you. And they would wave you off to the side if you made it say 120 miles in an hour instead of two. This was a long time ago.
There are a fair few of those average speed camera setups near me and I love them, everyone just sits at the speed limit - far more effective than the trap cameras.
Also my GPS (via bluetooth headphones) tells me when I'm entering and leaving a zone (not that I speed).
We do not have average speed cameras in Sweden and I hope we never will. The privacy implications of taking a photograph of everyone, process "who they are" (reg plate, generally driven by family member) is horrifying.
What privacy implications? The government already knows who you are, they processed your vehicle registration and issued that license plate specifically to make your vehicle publicly identifiable.
Are you also terrified that just anyone can read your house numbers or the address on your mailbox?
The problem is automated and centralised surveillance. The government can aggregate this data and build movement patterns on all citizens. They might not do it, but they could. And once something to exert power is possible, It'll be done eventually.
Governments arguably have a public safety interest in aggregating traffic data and being able to identify potential criminal suspects by vehicle. Yes, they could abuse that in some nebulous Orwellian future, but data collection and analysis isn't evil in and of itself.
Also, this is public data. Anyone sitting behind you in traffic has your license plate number, your employer and anyone you schedule appointments with can predict your behavior to a degree. Your movements were never that private to begin with.
If you want to be afraid of someone, be afraid of businesses, and what they can know based on analyzing customer data.
Governments have their own self interest at heart, second comes everything else. My license plate is indeed public information, should someone follow me around and document evertything I'm doing. I'm fine with that as the amount of resources required to perform this far outweighs any potential gains. When It's automated by computers It's very cheap. I'm no expert in image classification technology, but i imagine a top of the line Xeon could extract license plate information and the parts of the images containing humans (for later cross reference with some other dataset) a couple thousand times a second. Meaning it'll cost close to nothing.
Yes, we should be vary of the data everyone is collecting. I remember a friend of mine saying his grandmother was so suprised she always got offers in the mail from ICA (Big grocery store company in Sweden) on the products she purchases. Completely unaware that they're tracking every purchase she makes because of her membership card.
Ask someone in China how they're feeling about being constantly monitored in every concieveable way. You'll of course think "Well that's China, we don't have that kind of mass surveillance here". And then one bill after another you're right there in the boat with them.
Then ANPR is hardly the bottleneck. If they're able to get the tracking legislated, they'll be able to get cameras. If we're going to avoid technology just for vague allusions to dictatorships, we should get rid of the autobahn too.
You could ask the victims of the FBI's 'Highway Serial Killings' initiative how they'd feel about it. But they're dead.
If you're refering to doorbells with a camera facing the outside then no, they're very uncommon.
There's very strict rules about how you're legally allowed to point a fixed installation camera in Sweden, you're not allowed to have a fixed installation that'll record anything that isn't your property. Not even the corner of the pavement. All in all, Swedes don't want cameras pointing all over, you have to put up signs if there are cameras and usually you should apply for a permit before installing cameras.
Inside your house you're free to record as you like though.
Similar restrictions in the U.K. with signs. CCTV signs are usually up for commercial companies, but residential wise it isn’t enforced, and from the local Facebook group people seem shocked at the very idea recording te street and posting pictures of troublemakers is illegal.
I was disappointed by the number of people with them when I went door knocking for the election last year.
The police actually advised me to get one for my grandmother who has been suffering from door to door scammers.
>Beyond that, if you don’t want to get a fine, don’t speed
My concern with this kind of thing is less about the speed limit and more that I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police. It’s one thing if the police have to observe something suspicious and then take the time to stop you for ID to find out who you are. It’s another if they can track and identify everyone all the time passively.
> I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police.
You can. Just not in a car, because cars have license plates so not only can police identify you, anyone who can lookup a plate can. It’s non-anonymous almost by definition.
Where I live the registry is public so if I want I can ask for the owner of a license plate from the relevant authority.
But I think one of the things we see with technology and privacy is that there’s a real difference between things that you can do, but they require manual human action and are therefor costly, and things that are done effortlessly and constantly. We’ve always had license plates, but we haven’t always had a government record of where every car has travelled. We will soon, I’m sure.
And right now it’s true you can mostly walk or bike around in public without being tracked, but that’s just until we get the facial recognition really going. Then the argument will be that you were always showing your face in public and it was always possible that someone would recognize you so this is no different. But of course it will be different.
And now it’s possible, if you have a conversation in a cafe, that someone will overhear you. But if every conversation were being recorded, transcribed, and transmitted to the authorities, that wouldn’t be the same thing at all.
We get this problem all the time. The registry of cars was “public” so anyone could call and ask for the details or a car (e.g whether it had debt or parking fines or whether the guy trying to sell it was actually the owner). Then with the arrival of the internet, should this information be available at everyone’s fingertips? Should it be possible to web search it or was the phone call a good “rate limiter” and prevented abuse? It was actually decided it was, and it’s now call/text only.
The discussion about everything being logged is why I like the GDPR. It’s the long term mass gathering of data that should be addressed.
But to what end? Ignoring the privacy aspect, the point should not be too ensure everyone goes the does limit or slower. The point should be that people are traveling at a reasonable and safe speed. Driving fast doesn't necessarily mean unsafe. You can be driving the speed limit and be going at an unsafe speed. So the speed cameras make it more likely that people will be under the speed limit. But are the roads safer?
Absolutely yes. Speed contributes in two major ways when it comes to accidents, which this is all about: reaction time and energy.
Going faster means you have less time to react and handle the situation.
If you're going 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, and something happens 100m in front of you, you have only 3.6 seconds instead of 4.5 seconds to react and deal with it. This scales with distance.
If you're going at 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, your car has 50% more kinetic energy. This translates fairly directly into increased breaking distance.
So as speed increases you have less time to react and in addition you require more time to slow down.
Or to put it a bit more bluntly, based on this chart[1] of typical stopping distances versus speed, you can come to a stop in 53m if you're going 80km/h.
If instead you're going 100km/h, your car will be still be doing over 60km/h after 53m...
Obviously the exact numbers will vary based on car and conditions, but the point stands about just how much things change when you're speeding.
Do the numbers speak for themselves? In Ireland, at least, speed cameras are generally placed at compliance black spots, not accident black spots. Speed cameras on extremely safe motorways here have never been shown to reduce accidents, only to reduce speeding.
> Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
I got a 100€ fine for speeding on a 130km/h. My crime? I was driving 100km/h instead of the supposed speed limit of 80km/h.
Every day I drive down that section I slow down to 80km/h while everyone else rightfully drives at almost twice the speed at 130km/h or even faster without getting a ticket. I don't think this is safe. It's also not good for me psychologically. It means the rules are stupid and arbitrary and not worth trusting.
Take it another level. Every car should have a chip. Once you are in a speed limit - your car can't go faster. Oh wait, this wont generate revenue - so it wont work. Never mind.
> very car should have a chip. Once you are in a speed limit - your car can't go faster.
This is actually dangerous because people need the ability to use discretion.
Suppose you're transporting a part to repair a machine which is causing a fatality every five seconds as long as it's offline. Getting there 20 seconds faster saves four lives. Do you still want a chip that prevents you from exceeding the speed limit?
> Oh wait, this wont generate revenue - so it wont work. Never mind.
This is a major reason why the US doesn't have many speed cameras either. Also why most of the speed limits are set 10-15 MPH below the ordinary speed of travel. If violations are prolific and enforcement is sporadic, they can generate fine revenue whenever they want.
If enforcement is automatic then people figure that out and do what's necessary to avoid the fine, but then you're left with an expensive boondoggle that isn't generating revenue.
It also deprives the police of the excuse they currently have to pull over cars at whim when everybody is speeding at all times, and they wouldn't be happy to lose that at all.
Is that Homo Economicus driving the delivery truck?
You'd expect a machine that saves a life every 5 seconds to have some kind of investment in redundancy. Either is spread over more machines or the wonder device has spare parts that are kept stocked.
And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
> Is that Homo Economicus driving the delivery truck?
Is it too far of a leap to expect that someone who knows they're doing something where lives are at risk and time is of the essence will rightly estimate that the optimal travel speed is in excess of the ordinary speed at which accountants commute to their office buildings?
> You'd expect a machine that saves a life every 5 seconds to have some kind of investment in redundancy. Either is spread over more machines or the wonder device has spare parts that are kept stocked.
You might think that, but in reality, humans are fallible and don't always have perfect foresight.
Maybe they had a spare on site, but the spare was defective, or was the wrong revision number and incompatible. Maybe the part is a filter, but the problem is that there are a hundred times more pollutants than normal, so they already used all their spare filters and need twenty more ASAP. Maybe the machine is the backup generator for a hospital, which was damaged by the same lightning strike that caused the power outage.
> And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
The scenario is the machine goes offline so the company immediately calls the shop with the part who immediately leaves to deliver it. It's a five minute drive at the speed limit, but meaningfully less if you exceed it.
The police response time is six minutes, they can't help you. Your suggestion is for parliament to enact legislation in that amount of time?
All I'm saying is that the example is contrived, it streches credulity. You're making a marginalist argument where the cost of being slow is increased enormously. I could as well make up a scenario where each additional kph increase costs some absurd number of lives, and then it balances wherever you pick the numbers to balance.
> And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
My scenario is that we run out of parts due to a foreseen supply chain issue, and parliament can then indeed pass a law to let the delivery guy drive faster, assuming the issue is not fixed.
And for your case, there is already a judicial system that will give you a break if these things happen. In the end, and this is what we really mean to be discussing, rules vs discretion ends up with discretion somewhere in the system.
> All I'm saying is that the example is contrived, it streches credulity. You're making a marginalist argument where the cost of being slow is increased enormously.
Things like that actually happen. Hospital generators fail during a power outage. The floodgate machinery for a dam fails and if they can't get it open in time the dam will burst.
Instances exist of someone without lights and sirens on their car having a legitimate need to get somewhere quickly.
> I could as well make up a scenario where each additional kph increase costs some absurd number of lives, and then it balances wherever you pick the numbers to balance.
But then human discretion is deployed in the other direction, and you don't drive the vehicle that fast, even if the vehicle itself doesn't prevent you from doing so.
> And for your case, there is already a judicial system that will give you a break if these things happen.
What we are discussing is having a chip in your car that prevents you from exceeding the speed limit. How is ex post facto judicial understanding supposed to help with that?
It's a bad example, but there are legitimate scenarios where you want the ability to (temporarily) drive above the speed limit. E.g. speeding up until you can get out of the way of an ambulance, or to avoid getting rear-ended.
Almost all cars can be set to respect a speed limit already; I do that when I drive on highways to make sure I don’t accidentally go over (which is easy to do especially when others around me do it).
Outside of the US (and perhaps a few other places, but not many), speeding tickets are not designed to be a revenue source. (They do produce revenue, of course - but are not optimized or planned for that purpose)
This idea goes back a long way. In 1923 42,000 Cincinnati residents petitioned for mandatory speed governors to limit cars to 25 miles per hour [1]. This was an era when pedestrians typically owned the streets, so the advent of high-speed traffic caused a lot of pedestrian deaths.
Best keep my old car then. Some of the measures are useful though, some like alcohol interlocks are dumb, will trigger too many false positives or are easily circumvented. Compliance by 2024 is actually a hidden subsidy to the auto industry. How would they retrofit lane assist on an older vehicle? You'd have to buy a new one.
It's a bad analogy because it's hard to imagine any kinds of thoughts/behaviors that we're absolutely sure we want to prevent. (Maybe some amount of nonviolent mischief is good for humanity, maybe the impulse for violent retribution is necessary when justice systems are flawed, maybe these kinds of thoughts are generally not acted on and actually make people more self-reflective, etc.) But it's at least a bit harder to come up with reasons that speed limits should be exceedable on public roads and a bit easier to think up solutions. Medical emergencies are one possible case, but having an override that records that the override happened and that you'll have to give a good reason for doing is a possible solution. Maybe there's sudden traffic situations where you have to speed up to avoid a crash, and the system could be made to allow limited bursts of speed.
GPS isn't good enough for that yet. I have received warnings from my GPS because it thought I was driving at 70 mph in a 20 mph limit. In fact, I was driving at 70 mph on a motorway flyover above a residential street that had a 20 mph limit.
If it had been able to cut the engine (or, worse, apply the brakes) then that could have produced a dangerous situation.
There are situations in which that might be dangerous. On the other hand cars could be fixed (via the chip) with external and internal warning signals to show the world and driver that a speed limit has been exceeded. This might constitute a psychological barrier to breaking the limit when everyone around you knows you're in the wrong.
It’s common for trucks here to be governed to 70mph with a sign on the back saying so. Pretty sure it’s an insurance thing.
Recently I’ve seen the odd ones mentioning 40mph in town too.
Don't worry - in Brexit Britain the tailbacks will be so long you'll struggle to find a road you can break the speed limit on. And those you can all have bends on them.
I agree speed camera are necessary but "time of travel" speed cameras are absolutely violating the intent of the law, which is to have people drive safely.
Part of driving safely is that you may need to speed up to avoid a situation, or change lanes safely or what have you - a time of travel camera (in the way they get implemented which is identical to single-point speed cameras AFAIK) is essentially just a random ticket generating machine. If we're going to use these things, let's just require them to publish the license plate and time online, so our phone's can download the number and tell us if we're currently going to get ticketed going past them.
Because tickets aren't just monetary - at least in Australia, license demerit points mean you eventually lose your license, thus your ability to drive and very likely your job as a result.
For thought experiment, assume a five-mile stretch of road with 60mph limit, and "time of travel" ticket kicking in at 65mph. It takes 5 minutes to drive legally, and if you take less than 4:37 then you get the ticket.
Assume you drive at 60mph and then you suddenly have to "speed up" to 80mph to avoid a situation. How long can you drive at 80mph before you're ticketed? 69 seconds.
If you're driving for 69 seconds at 20mph above limit then you're not "avoiding a situation". You are speeding.
Time of travel are the only ones respecting the intent of a law?
Systems that measure your instantaneous speed will ding you for speeding up to avoid (or reduce the probability of) a collision. Time of travel as defined in GP only dings you if your average speed over many km exceeds the speed limit, a few temporary bursts of speed won't change your average speed significantly.
What a load of rubbish. Driving fast to overtake will not make a significant difference, unless you are one of those assholewz weaving between cars constantly overtaking.
It is ridiculous how blaze most roads users take speeding.
There are exactly 0 situations that require you to break the speed limit to become “safe.” The UK Highway Code and driving lessons are very explicit in how you respond to emergencies and “speed up” is not on the list.
There can be but only after you have already been inattentive or negligent leading up to the situation.
My teen is less than a year into his license. The other night he was driving us in an unfamiliar area and missed a sign indicating that the 3 lanes were merging into 2. He found himself at the merge point completely blocking a car trying to merge. Yes, the merging vehicle is obligated to yield but speeding up for a few seconds with open road in front of him was the safer move than braking hard or maintaining speed and hoping the merging vehicle yielded appropriately before it ran out of pavement.
So either he slows down to aid the overtake or it’s not possible in time and the overtaking vehicle slows down to merge behind.
Appreciate these things are tough when you’re still new, nervous in an unfamiliar area, etc. but that’s the time you go back to basics on your driving to maximise safety.
There are very rare situations when speeding saves you. One example is someone going into your lane and driving into you for a head on collision. Assuming there is space to swerve you should also accelerate to escape faster.
That being said it's so extremely rare there is no point debating those cases. If speeding was physically not possible it would be a better and safer world.
Absolutely not. In such a situation, you don’t have time to look to your side to check it’s empty. The safest thing is to slam on your brakes and hope they do the same.
If you’re suggesting someone is intent on killing you by speeding vehicle, then yes this pretty much never happens between cars.
It happens rarely but regularly. They fall asleep or try to pass and don't see you. This kind of passing is very common and major fatal accident cause in my country. If there is place to the right (assuming driving on right country) (sometimes designated safety area or a field of grass or whatever) then you have to escape and you have to accelerate to escape faster. Being only makes sense if there is enough time or it looks like they might be breaking as well. If it's a truck for example going your way hitting the brakes is just suicide.
Anyway my point is that it does happen. I agree it's rare. I would be careful when it comes to trusting UK guidelines blindly. Last time I checked they recommended push and pull steering which is to put it mildly a very bad way to control a car.
I didn't know this was a thing in the US until a few months ago - apparently the local police notify insurance companies (somehow) of speeding violations and thus give the insurance reason to increase your premiums.
If the goal is to charge people who take actions that result in higher probability of losses, then it makes sense. Otherwise, drivers that have less probability to cause losses are subsidizing those that do.
Also, in the US as far as I know, you can “fight” the ticket in court and pay the local government more to reduce the level of speeding ticket and hence points you get, so that the insurance company doesn’t see any speeding (or sees less severe speeding).
> If the goal is to charge people who take actions that result in higher probability of losses, then it makes sense. Otherwise, drivers that have less probability to cause losses are subsidizing those that do.
How can it not be a competitive disadvantage? Auto insurance profit margins are very low, and I’m sure the actuaries have access to plenty of data about losses correlated with speeding.
If a speeding ticket did not result in higher losses (probabilistically, not in specific individual cases of course), then a person with a speeding ticket should be able to find cheaper insurance.
The other option is there’s highly qualified people who are decent enough at math to operate insurance companies, but not decent enough to realize they are mispricing an obvious variable.
They aren't notifying insurance companies. The violation becomes a part of your driving record and the insurance companies pull this information at regular intervals that can vary by company.
That's the same thing, just in a different part of the process. Why does the insurance company get access to your driving record, which ideally is confidential between you and the state? Corporate lobbying making laws that give select companies access to everyone's driving records?
Driving slightly under the speed limit (and perhaps bumping existing speed limits slightly upward before increasing the efficiency of enforcement) should address most of those concerns.
My main objection is that enforcement, at least in the UK is absolutely useless. The likelihood of actually coming across a speed trap is tiny, the likelihood of coming across a speed trap that isn't one of the ones that are regularly used is close to 0. So it's not like people who speed get fined. It's people who speed and get unlucky get fined (and points). I just think it's bad policy to have relatively huge penalties and relatively rubbish enforcement. It's capricious and ineffective. People still speed because being caught is highly unlikely, people who get caught face a penalty that is disproportionate for something so common. The increase of tools like this don't actually address that. Tools like this don't actually address the policy failure in speed enforcement.
Ironically you can pretty much only get caught by the irregular ones if you’re on a quiet road too - otherwise someone will flash you as you approach to let you know. At least in some places anyway.
I sometimes flash people on roads where there are no speed traps. This way I achieve two things: defeating the usefulness of flashing people as a warning and also possibly making people drive slower than they would.
They are making people slow down to the legal limit, thus resulting in a net increase of lawfullness on the road.
Also, around here, it's incredibly common to flash your lights to remind oncoming traffic to turn off their high-beams. It's a form of communication, and not all communication is distraction.
I disagree, it doesn't result at all in a "net increase" of lawfulness, it's just an extra person breaking the law and driving badly.
UK highway code is pretty clear on when it is acceptable or not to flash your headlights. Using them to alert others to your presence (ie, "I'm here please turn off your high beams") is fine. Doing it like the parent poster suggested could result in a £1000 fine if caught.
Check the laws in your local area first. Intentionally dazzling other drivers may be illegal and can carry a much higher fine (sometimes 10x more) than speeding, depending on country.
In the UK you should only flash your high beams to alert other drivers to your presence.
Using them as you describe could lead to a £1000 fine. I understand that people using them to warn drivers is also illegal, but two wrongs won't make this right. Why put yourself at risk for no benefit?
Honestly you should reconsider. There's enough bad driving on the roads without you adding to it.
The main issue is using fines as punishment, since people can affordably keep speeding if there aren't enough speed traps. The only way to solve most road problems is to forbid speeders from ever driving.
You already need a driving exam to drive, it doesn't seem crazy to now allow criminals who don't care about speed limits or safety from taking it.
> Personally, I'd rather they clamped down harder on tailgating, poor lane discipline and uninsured drivers than on motorway speed limits.
There's some interesting facts (?) that I've learned on the topic of traffic safety over time: certainly the speed one has is directly proportional to how bad an accident will be should a crash (née "accident") occur because of the kinetic energy involved.†
However, the speed differential between different vehicles also has a correlation to the accident rate because some folks are going 'too fast' but others are going 'too slow'. I've heard this used as an argument for variable/dynamic speed limits which are changed on factors such as road conditions and visibility.
† Numberphile has an interesting video on the topic: if a blue car is doing 70 (units/hour) and manages to just stop before an obstacle, what would happen to an identical model/mass red car going 100? Even though the red car was going only 30% faster, at the point that the blue car managed to (just) stop, the red car would be going 70.
The energy scrubbed from a starting speed of 70 is 70^2, so 4900; but going at 100 you have 10'000 energy (100^2): so if both cars managed to scrub ~5000 worth of energy, the blue car stopped, but the red car still at 5000 worth of energy left—i.e., 70 units/hour of speed.‡
‡ If you had the same blue/red cars going 55 and 100, while the red car would been going 'only' twice as fast, it would have had three times the kinetic energy because of 55^2 versus 100^2.
Speeding is one of the most obvious examples of government overreach.
1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?
2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
Speed limits are important for non-cars. As a cyclist, I don't want people overtaking me 100km/h with a 1m gap. As a pedestrian trying to cross a small city or town street without dedicated crossing, I don't want drivers to suddenly appear with 100km/h from a small curve. I'd argue that 50km/h in a city is still too much. 30km/h should be the limit.
Cars drive through cities at that speed regularly. They use highways. That’s what the people are saying. With better strategies for putting cars and non-cars at decent distances, we can allow for cars to go faster with the same or lower risk. The issue right now is that people in cars want higher speeds and pedestrians/cyclists want to go all over the road like cars don’t exist. These two things don’t work and thus we have to go with whatever is the slowest of the equation here (people jumping into the street). The annoying part is when there are low speed limits but almost no pedestrian or cycling traffic on such roads. Highways are frequently an example of that in the US. (Literally no pedestrians or cyclists anywhere near but speed limits are frequently 55mph in some places but 80+ in others - no reasoning for the difference)
Have you ever consider that 1m gap is a product of speed limits? If we didn't have such limits, dedicated cycle lanes set apart from roads would become the norm imo.
Its not uncommon for cheap inadequate safety measures to supplant real ones.
> Have you ever consider that 1m gap is a product of speed limits?
It's hardly better on rural streets with 100km/h limit and lots of space to overtake. It's not a speed limit issue, it's an issue with car drivers not giving a damn about cyclists and pedestrians because they have no concept of how dangerous this is. Speed limits are essential in a city, and bumps are needed in addition to them.
I think this is a reasonable stance. Personally, I don't have a problem with the in-city, shared roads having very low limits.
I have a huge problem with enormous super-highways having 60mph limits or lower.
Some of the roads out where I live were engineered with going 90+ in mind. In fact, there's a tale of an engineer going such speeds and getting out of a ticket by explaining that to the judge out here.
What was the speed limit? When you're over 15 miles from the city, it's 60, but pass a turn in the road and it's 70.
> 1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?
As are most limits.
I get that driving on a motorway at say 85 mph is probably not that much dangerous than the speed limit (70 mph) but 100? 120? 140?
I know about Germany, but would you say that Britain's or Slovenia's road are designed and kept to the same standard?
> 2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
how do you constrain speed on a motorway?
> The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
In this country (UK) there is this myth that the cameras are money making devices, when during the 2008 crisis they were turned off to save money for some constabularies, this is the same type of argument.
Putting limits on toxic compound X in food would also be an overreach according to your views. At some point we have curves of accident rate and estimated speeds of accident and a decision is made. For food, we have an estimated exposure (plus other factors such as lab tests on animals etc) plotted against chances to develop a disease later...
Roundabouts are not always a good solution, in US I kept seeing people taking them the wrong way going directly left..
Also what is your proof that cameras don't slow down traffic? Just talking about me it make me more conscious of my speed in the city to avoid getting fined. So I guess I'm the kind of people it is directed at.
Gosh isn't that the truth. I remember reading on reddit years ago about a "study" where college students drove on freeways in a wall, one in each lane, going exactly the speed limit no faster and no slower. It backed up traffic for miles.
Where I am in Southern California the freeway speed limit in most places is 65 MPH. EVERYONE drives over 65 MPH on the freeways. I think you are more likely to get pulled over on the freeway if you are in the left lane actually going 65 than if you are going 75-80 in one of the middle lanes (the speed everyone else is going so it looks normal).
This just creates a situation where basically everyone is "breaking the law" and gives cops a reason to arbitrarily pull anyone over that they want.
I fully agree with you that speed limits are not about safety they are about instilling fear in citizens that at any moment you could be pulled over and harassed (even worse for colored people) and about being a source of revenue to find this tyranny
Not really. If limits are overreach why does every country have them? Ask some people with kids if they want yobs to be able to race at 120 mph in their neighborhoods. Speed bumps are ok on side streets but not so much other roads.
Tailgating is my biggest hate while driving. The tailgating driver is way over confident that he can stop in time. Its me who will pay the price when he can't. (No I don't drive slowly and do drive in the correct lane when there is a choice.) I hope AVs will fix this.
We don’t need AVs for that. Adaptive Cruise Control with self-breaking cars can do this now; it’s very much how I prefer to drive on a motorway, knowing the car will deal with it if I lose concentration or react late for whatever reason.
Obviously these are optional extras on most cars, but the self braking and auto-distance-keeping could be made a legal requirement well before we see self-driving cars. I’d be all for that.
My car will comfortably sit at 110mph all day long, if I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering? It certainly isn't about safety because that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
Fact is that people drive that speed regularly on German autobahns without any widespread carnage. Driving aggressively when below the speed limit, or being distracted, is far more dangerous than just driving quickly on a clear road. The emphasis on speed is mainly because it’s easy to measure and enforce.
There’s standard etiquette there to slow down when there are vehicles in the distance ahead or curves or imperfect visibility. You don’t have to drive like a mindless drone holding a one-size-fits-all-situations speed limit. You and other drivers are generally safer going 160 km/h on a mostly empty highway than 50 km/h through an urban where there’s a much higher risk of encountering other people/vehicles/obstructions.
In Germany not all drivers want to go fast even on unlimited sections. And people are much more respectful (both fast drivers and slow drivers) of who use which lanes and to not push you if you are in the right lane. Statistically you would be safer anyway at 130km/h on that same highway than at 160km/h. Lets compare apples to apples.
My point is that driving at 160 km/h on a fairly empty highway in a manner that is respectful of others is not particularly dangerous. In fact it’s pretty relaxed and routine in Germany for the middle lane of 3 lane derestricted autobahn. The right lane goes 130 km/h, middle lane goes 160 km/h, left lane stays mostly empty except for the occasional person passing. People keep their distance, slow down when there’s traffic in the distance ahead, and strictly adhere to keeping right except to pass. On most modern cars, stopping distance and fuel economy are also pretty reasonable at 160 km/h. I will admit people flying by at over 200 km/h in the left lane can be scary, and stopping distance and fuel economy become terrible for most cars at 200 km/h, though it generally works safely there because of the strict lane etiquette, coupled with people maintaining distance and slowing down in advance when traffic is ahead.
A bigger danger than speeding on clear highways is things like tailgating, weaving between lanes, aggressive passing, and distracted driving. This often happens below speed limits, and is not the focus of automated speed enforcement systems.
In Ontario, Canada, we have wide, well maintained, and well engineered highways that have unreasonably low speed limits of 90 or 100 km/h. While there are times when it’s necessary to drive more slowly (bad weather, traffic ahead), strictly enforcing such limits on wide clear highways in good weather would be silly. People here generally drive 120-130 km/h because cars are designed to operate safely and efficiently at these speeds. Strictly enforcing unreasonably low speed limits would just breed contempt from drivers, so currently the police are lenient with the speeds people actually drive. Strict enforcement of speed limits could be more reasonable if they set realistic speed limits, perhaps variable ones depending on the weather and traffic conditions.
At 130kph, you will spend more of your life driving than at 160kph. If you drive 16k km/yr at speed on motorways, the difference is about 23 hours/yr or 2 months (3 waking months) over your driving lifetime. That’s a different form of life being taken away as well.
> Anybody can have an accident at any speed that could lead to a fatality
Sure, but do you really think the risk of having an accident, and if so, the risk of it resulting in a fatality, has no relationship to the speed involved?
We accept that virtually every activity carries some risk, but we also choose (as a society, whether you as an individual agree or not) to set some rules to help limit the level of that risk.
Plus the pollution from the car, your embalming or cremation etc. And You are clearly endangering other people coming behind your flat body later and putting lifes of emergency service and cleaning crews at risk, just for your the enjoyment of breaking a rule you feel isn't fair.
Until you hit a pothole, a bird or other animal, aquaplane or any other thing that happens to thousands of people just like you every day. I hope you are an organ donor at least.
>that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
What car is it and with what tires? I'll be happy to look up the facts.
That's the reason there was the national mandate to drive no faster than 55mph on any road in the entire United States.
You're welcome to drive no faster than that speed on any road you like. On several of them, please, please don't drive on any road that has a higher speed limit than 60 to keep the rest of us safe, though. And have your hazards on, so we can reasonably get around you.
We had THE ONE software engineer that is better than everybody that ever does a single mistake. But we also have THE ONE driver that is better than every other driver. It has been studied drivers are overconfident in their abilities...
Maybe I'm missing something but the "The Drive" article and the article they reference [1] talk about reading license plates up to half a mile (750m):
> read the license plates of speeding cars almost half a mile (750 m) away. In actuality, the TruCam II itself is technically capable of clocking plates up to almost a full mile (1.5 km)
But the actual product spec of the device [2] says:
> Quickly view license plate details and collect crystal-clear images up to +/- 150 meters away!
I don't see anywhere it can actually read a license plate half a mile away. It only says in the specsheet it can do a speed measurement about a mile away:
> Maximum Measurement: 1,200 meters/1,500 meters; extended range can be modified by request
I was prosecuted and fined for speeding in the UK on the basis of two Police officers' testimony that they observed their own speedometer while following me. A UK Police officer can assert that he saw a thing recorded on a calibrated device and it will stick in court.
I would imagine that a Police officer could testify that he measured the speed using the calibrated device and continued to observe the same vehicle until it was possible to read the number plate.
In many countries the word of a police officer carries more weight by virtue of the authority they represent. It's considered that they are qualified to be entrusted with a lot of responsibility, so they are also inherently more trustworthy. This sounds reasonable especially given how many incidents are witnessed with no hard evidence - like jay walking, littering, disturbing public peace, etc. and probably also a lot of more serious offenses. You could be caught trying to steal a car in a dark street and all that stands between you and freedom is the police officer's word.
In this day and age with the possibility of just using body cams to cover this it should no longer matter. But the real qualm I have with this logic is that it's never turned on its head: if a trusted officer of the law breaks that trust they should be punished far more harshly. This almost never happens.
Their testimony is given more weight not because of virtue of authority but by the familiarity and working relationships they enjoy in judicial system.
Same reason they get lesser punishment, a familiar colleague or someone from the organization you work daily with, or any persona you identify with better ( same school, ethnic/ racial background etc) will likely be treated more favourably .
Lawyers enjoy an even better familiarity but not the same level of trust. Police officers are trusted to run after criminals and catch them so implicitly with the authority to do this also comes that trust. They need it to do their job. Otherwise they would face the same reaction when doing their job as you would as a normal person trying to act like a police officer.
As for the punishment, there is no reasonable analogy here. They only get the privileges enshrined in law and are treated equally everywhere else (e.g. punishment), it's not a matter of favoritism. I'm not aware of cases where a country imposes substantially harsher punishment for police officers convicted of a crime, especially when during the line of duty.
Lawyers can be in adversarial roles to the judge, i.e. it easier to antagonize a judge as a lawyer than a police officer.
Lawyers do enjoy preferential treatment than you and me in the system for couple reasons, one they the rules and are likely to use/exploit them, also various agents of system tend to be careful about procedure around a lawyer, one of the reasons you should hire a lawyer asap if ever arrested.
>Their testimony is given more weight not because of virtue of authority but by the familiarity and working relationships they enjoy in judicial system.
In the civilized parts of the world this is part of the law - not some "hey I know a judge therefor I am above the law" BS. If you are in a country that is as corrupt as you say it is at least mention which it is.
This happened to my friend in the US. He presented evidence for why it was impossible for the officer to actually measure his speed from where the officer was and where they said he was at the time of measurement (around a corner I believe). The judge simply asked the officer if the device was calibrated, to which he replied 'yes', and my friend was deemed guilty.
> Anything involving fines needs to be absolutely 100% infallible.
No it doesn't: not even criminal trials, with the possibility of the death sentence, are done to that standard.
It can be done to the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" or even "balance of probabilities" / "preponderance of the evidence" which the civil trials tends to be. Given that it's 'only' fines involved, then the latter is often used for traffic violations:
This can get tricky in places where there are many plate designs. Some US states such as Georgia, reuse the same number on multiple plates. They're distinguished by the plate design. Those can be difficult enough for a human reviewers to distinguish, can't imagine software will have an easier time of it. Then throw in plates from other states, things get even messier. And though license plate frames aren't suppose to block any relevant information on a license plate, they often do.
I'm curious about the context of the $13,000 price tag. Is this a slight upcharge? Or an order of magnitude?
I'm what the Brits might call a "keen motorist", but as someone who considers speed enforcement a necessary evil, there's a world of difference between paying a bit more for much better tech, versus way more. If this costs 4x what a normal radar gun costs, one must ask "what is the problem we're solving", and is it worth the money? Are there renegades out there going double the speed limit, then magically slowing to below the limit 1/2mi from a radar gun, somehow?
I'm certainly happier with the idea of an officer-operated speed camera than one parked by the side of the road with no discretion whatsoever.
Of course, there are plenty of people who rightfully point out that discretion can mean discrimination.
The point of distributing this technology is to make every motorist feel that nowhere is "safe" for them to speed. It doesn't matter if there are no cops around, their beams can get you and fine you, and hopefully that keeps people at safe driving speeds.
Driving in the UK is stressful enough. If I've driven down the motorway for long periods I am normally wondering if I've got a ticket because of the variable speed limits. I have no intention of breaking the speed limit, but I honestly don't know if I had because the speed limit in some places can be changing all the time. Great so I have more things to worry about when I drive to work. Brilliant.
Most of the drivers that drive at extreme speeds are usually very rich (they are always driving Mercs, Range Rovers, Audis and BMWs) and don't typically give a toss about the fine or the points.
Also there are many people (usually immigrants) who drive without a valid license and insurance.
Yet it's well known many UK motoways have speed cameras at regular distances as well as average speed cameras in many places, and there are still huge numbers of people caught by them?
My first time driving in the UK, I had just come from Iceland where there is a sign before every speed camera. I slowed down for all the signs in the UK, before realizing nobody else did. It seems it's typical these things only catch "foreigners" who don't know the area or its customs.
If it were just the features (time of flight and image recognition), probably not 13k. I’m not an expert in police gear, but there are likely performance standards that the manufacturer has to prove so that the readings can stand up in court. That plus the durability required and range of operating conditions it has to perform in, and the fact that it’s a fault niche device will increase the cost. 13k still might be too high, but I wonder if an autoblog knows what a police department actually pays for it.
If police departments have any kickback from fines, that’s a massive organizational mistake.
It creates crazy incentives to maximize fines instead of reducing crime.
I thought only the US had made that mistake.
It's practically certain the major cost of a handheld speed camera is employing a hand. It doesn't have to be a lot more reliable/efficient to easily make up for the cost.
> To the inevitable dismay of U.K. street racers who
> primarily partake in their favorite illegal motorsport
> after hours, the TruCam II also features night mode
> whereas the first TruCam, which has already reportedly
> been in use for the past six years, only worked during the
> daytime.
I think this really comes down to the letter of the law vs the spirit of it. To the spirit of the law, i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody? Is doing excessive speed on an empty well-lit motorway going to kill anybody?
Ultimately if you're only a danger to yourself then personally I think the responsibility is on the individual. For example, as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves.
As a free person I think you need to have the right to make bad decisions and accept their consequences, as long as those do not impact others. For a long time there has been an unwritten rule (at least where I live) where greater speed is generally more acceptable at night with fewer road users. It's not uncommon for the local police to overtake you at 90 mph for example.
The spirit of the law is not just to save third party lives.
When you cause an accident, you drain society’s emergency response resources (and increase the premiums of those in your insurance pool).
35mph vs 30mph is a terrible example - this is the scenario where pedestrians and cyclists are most likely to be around. 75mph vs 70mph would have been a better example.
Driving at night is more dangerous than at day because of the reduced visibility.
Driving when fewer other road users are around is safer than when it’s busy, but you don’t have perfect knowledge and there may be road users you haven’t seen, especially at night.
There’s no objective moral cliff edge between 70mph and 70mph+ε, but there is one between complying with the law and breaking it. Society collectively draws the line somewhere and you don’t get to unilaterally decide everybody else is wrong. I’ve heard people saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”.
Check out the sibling comments for examples of people who thought they knew better but didn’t.
The thing about Scotland is completely wrong, I have no idea why you would think that.
The "when you do $x, you drain society's emergency resources" is, IMO, an absurd argument.
If this is true, then you need to point the finger at so many things. Rock-climbing. Mountain biking. And it progresses, to "anything even remotely risky", where "risky is now the absolute lowest common denominator".
And of course, so many sports? Banned.
This sort of "walking on eggshells" view of life is quite disturbing to me.
The key difference is that all of the things you’ve listed are legal. Society allows them because the risk comes with some reward, and we find it tolerable to accept or mitigate that risk.
There are plenty of other activities like speeding where the rewards do not justify the risks, and the government has made laws to prevent that risk being taken. Unlicensed aviation, amateur gas boiler repair, knife-fighting...
Legality is not relevant. Morality is. Do not conflate the two, for they are not the same.
Example: society, and yes democratic ones, once told black people that they had no rights ; that they were animals; livestock. They also told Jews that they could not vote.
Was society spot on there?
What about the 1000s upon 1000s of examples of immoral laws which can be found, over time, and yes even now, which serves to invalidate the claim that following them is moral? From where I sit, each law must be measured against ones own morality. Failure to do so, is to cast the responsibility each human has aside, to instead wrap yourself in a shell of false righteousness!
I am not claiming "ignore the law", but merely that you may not determine what is 'right or wrong', merely due to the opinions of others around you, nor due to a societal system which attempts to balance thousands of pressures, and then pass laws.
Firstly, courts have repeated struck down sections of laws, or laws in their entirety, for this very reason. And often after those laws have stood for decades. By your logic, by your reasoning, to follow those laws is a moral requirement, yet one minute you are moral, the next immoral?
The stroke of a judge's pen, an argument in Parliament/Congress, and your morals are now right, or wrong?
No.
Your morals must be crafted on your own, examined, re-examined, see battle against your own interpretation of the universe, and grow with time. Laws are not this.
Laws are not morals.
Laws are not to be followed blindly.
To that end, I find your argument to be lacking. You assume that society is "better than the person" at determining "right or wrong". This is not so.
The government is not papa, mama, to be looked to for advice.
If you wish to discuss further, I am happy to, but I will not accept an argument that places legality on some sort of even keel, even subsuming morality.
Not even remotely true. The world has responded with "lockdowns", "masks", and more, which is the result of an unprecedented, 100 year class event, that being a pandemic.
Your comment isn't really about normality, but instead about an extreme edge case scenario. The only thing worse than a pandemic, might be nuclear war, a massive nuclear accident, or large-scale disaster.
Normality need not be conflated with actions during emergency scenarios.
Lastly -- imagine if people DID engage in more, "only affected themselves' risky behaviour. It would mean more hospital visits, therefore more hospital capacity, more doctors/nurses/etc etc, which would mean more ability to absorb and deal with large scale emergency issues.
It's terrible but similar number of people die every year in car accidents yet there is no moral panic. We can't even agree on finally enforcing speed limits but with the virus we closed the whole world. I mean pollution in major cities is a bigger health problem objectively than the virus and yet we still allow old diesels to drive in most of them.
What I am saying is not that we shouldn't treat the virus seriously but that we really need a lot not urgency when dealing with topics like speeding and pollution.
That “similar number of people” still die despite the enormous amount of work that goes in to road death reduction! We are doing things, and we are affecting the road toll. A quick look at Australia shows that from the worst years, 1970s, where ~3,500 died a year, we’re now down to ~1,200. That’s a 3x reduction because we did something. (Airbags, improved car design, improved road design, improved compliance, etc.)
If only we had some sort of analogue for doing something vs. not doing something re: COVID. Oh wait, we do.
- Number of Australians dead: 908.
- Population adjusted, 13.1x: 12,000.
- Number of Americans dead: 298,000.
That’s 25x as many. We did something, America didn’t.
So what might be unacceptable "speedo pedo"ism where you live might be completely normal going 5 miles over the posted speed limit elsewhere. My personal experience is that people tend to drive at a speed they feel safe at, and don't pay that much attention to the signs.
Japanese law requires the police to prove that you were speeding beyond reasonable doubt, so posted speed limits are all 20km/h+ under the de facto speed limit. It leads to absurd situation like expressways with a posted 60km speed limit but a 100km/h real limit.
That's the reason we need to enforce speed limit. People are terrible at assessing what's safe. Even if they can somehow manage to assess their personal safety they have terrible judgement when it comes to other road users. You may feel very safe going over speed limit in a residential area but pedestrians, cyclists etc. won't.
A few points on this: society doesn’t make speed limits, municipal administrators (and sometimes small town police themselves) do. The speed limits are often set by observation, and they intentionally leave a large number of drivers over that limit (they say this is for safety, but it seems to also be for revenue generation). Look up 85th percentile speed.
So some politicians and engineers draw a line so that 15% of the population is in violation and will change the speed limit at any point that this isn’t true (if nobody is in violation, they lower the speed limit). You can’t then cast moral judgment on that 15%. It’s intentional criminalization of the citizenry, even though it’s generally with the intent of saving lives.
They are also set for other reasons, like "Bob complained a lot, because of the noise of cars", and the limit gets reduced.
Or "this road was quiet 20+ years ago", but the city has grown, and now it is a major throughfare, so "Local residents campaigned to get a low speed limit", so that alternate routes are preferable.
> saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”
I laughed at "speedo pedos", but is it though?
One of these crimes is clearly considerably more serious than the other, and legislators agree with me. That's why in UK law minor speeding offences attract a fine and points on your license[0], but no criminal record, whereas offences of pedophilia result in prison time, a criminal record, and addition on the sexual offenders register.
The line of thinking is superficially similar, the weight of the offence isn't, and we shouldn't trivialise serious offences by drawing false equivalences with those that are considerably less serious.
[0] This is generally the case, but if you accrue too many points you can of course lose your license. Similarly, more serious speeding offences attract more serious penalties, and may even result in jail time. There are plenty of other examples but, see, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34744.... The level of stupidity on display here is truly monumental.
"as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves."
As a person who grew up in the Scottish countryside I can assure you that is absolutely not the case, and drunk driving is _extremely_ frowned upon. In fact Scotland has generally had tougher drink driving regulations than England. (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-30329743).
This kind of comment could be interpreted as casual racism (casting Scots as child-like alcoholics living in a semi-regulated playground), but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, since its a Sunday morning and nearly Christmas.
IDK about the UK, but in Germany street racers have killed many innocent bystanders, just for the crime of crossing the street at night. So yes please, enforce rules more strongly.
In fact, even ambulances crash into each other every now and then at night, because they usually drive without their horns (technically then they aren't allowed to run red lights, only if it's been sounding for at least 15 seconds, but people want to sleep).
I'm in the UK, and by the time you've reached a certain age, we've all heard of families torn about by bad driving. The couple who we bought our house from, the mother pulled out in front of two racers just down the road from us and ended up with life changing injuries, unable to walk and with brain damage. A little boy at our local nursery died along with his father hitting a van head on who'd crossed the road taking a corner too fast.
It's not just boy racers, but plenty of older men and women who are reckless and inpatient in their usual driving. There are people who think that their luxury cars are an excuse to break the road rules as well as the rules of common courtesy.
Despite the UK having one of the safest road networks in the world, still around 75 people die or are seriously injured per week in car accidents. For a preventable injury that is still far too high.
Purely anecdotal, I noticed there were far more people in fancy cars going at ridiculous speeds in ridiculous stretches of roads with loads of pedestrians and cyclists around when I lived in Bristol compared to the Netherlands. I called them CICs: "Cunts In Cars".
Road design probably plays part in this; a comparatively wide fully asphalted road probably isn't the best design for 20mph. Traffic calming and all that.
It's a prevalent attitude of successful people who are used to lower ethical standards applied to them and being given priority in their day-to-day life. An extra factor is that premium cars (irrespective of wealth) are sought after by people with negative personality traits [1].
I don't know why the difference between UK and Netherlands, maybe due to differences in income equity and judicial fairness? I imagine the behaviour is worse in countries with worse social fairness (Russia, even US?).
In my observation, in the Netherlands someone with a flashy car is quicker seen as a show-off. Generally speaking, it has a somewhat more grounded and egalitarian culture. Someone calling themselves a "Baron such and such" or "Sir so and so" like they do in the UK? The entire country will roll their eyes.
In the UK, it's somewhere in-between the mainland European and American attitudes, where someone with a flashy car is seen as deserving of it through their hard work.
And not everyone who drives like an idiot has a flashy car by the way; lots of those pumped VW things and whatnot as well (in both countries).
Really? American police kill about 1000 people a year and the vast, vast majority of these killings are totally justified cases where deadly force was used to stop an imminent deadly threat. On the other hand about 36,000 people died on American roads last year and it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where any of them could have been necessary.
The real difference is that road deaths are far less likely to trigger a media circus.
I mean, structurally, you're right that police violence is a bigger problem, but I don't really understand the relevance to my comment when this entire thread was talking about cars.
But you don't even know any of the facts of the case? How would you have no hesitation when you have no idea what happened and haven't even listened to the defenses argument?
That's enough for me. Don't care what the arguments are, how much they were peer pressured or what their home lives were like. Obviously if the argument is "the cops got the wrong guy" then I'll listen to it.
I know all of these things, and furthermore, I'm not in the jurisdiction so it's all a hypothetical. I'm saying that in the hypothetical where I am asked to pass judgment on, and sentence, someone who street raced (for any reason) and killed a person, I would with no hesitations sentence that person to life without parole, and would probably only hesitate about an hour before sentencing them to death.
As far as I can find the lawyers are trying to get the only objective piece of evidence - the cars own logs - thrown out. Claim the witnesses are unreliable at judging speed and are clinging to an early statement that it might have been "low speed collision".
If we give them the benefit of the doubt why would they try to get rid of evidence that they were driving within legal limits? Especially when they have to deal with several "unreliable" witnesses claiming that they were driving too fast?
The reality is you never know if you’re really alone. Plenty of people are killed on “empty” country roads because the driver didn’t see them due to inappropriate speed, distractions or a combination.
The parent has a couple of counter examples to that. Seems like the caveats, that sometimes you do actually know you're alone, are exactly the scenarios we're talking about.
Unless you have constant surveillance on the km in front of you, you cannot know you're alone. Things happen. They may not be likely at all, but as a whole we're not good judges of probability.
Also, even if you crash with nobody around at the time, someone else may crash into the rescue team just arriving to help you.
At least in the more remote parts of Canada, hitting a moose at high speed has a very good probability of taking you out along with the moose. So driving respectfully at night is a really good idea.
IDK to me that sounds like downplaying the issue. Drunk driving is not ok, not even in remote parts of Scotland.
As for driving 35 in a 30 zone... I can agree that it's not much of an issue if it's next to a school and you drive in the middle of the night: there won't be any children entering or leaving the school at that time. But generally, these racers drive way faster, and don't give a fuck about any of these rules, red lights, etc. They see the roads as a racetrack. On the computer or console, they can play GTA V or whatever, I don't care. Just if they do it in the real world they deserve harsh punishments, as the risk of killing people is so extremely high.
30 v 35mph is not a trivial increase. It's nearly 20% faster. And kinetic energy scales quadratically with velocity.
According to a popular UK road safety campaign, if you hit a pedestrian at 35mph you're 2.5x more likely to kill them than if you hit them at 30mph (50% chance vs 20% chance)
The thing is expectations and boundaries. As a participant of traffic you need to be able to feel secure, regardless of day or night. So in your example (and I live near a school and 30 km/hour street near it), if there is hardly any traffic at night you don't expect anyone either. Which might make someone driving 50 km/hour even more dangerous than when everyone is driving too hard constantly during day.
Hmmm that's a good point indeed. I never said that you should drive 35 in a 30 zone, just that it's less of an issue than say drunk driving or road racing. Accidents can still happen though.
Surely there are animals frolicking around in these remote parts of Scotland. Think of deer. Traffic rules generally make sense, you should follow them. I live near a school. Its 30 km/hour around the school. People drive 50-60. Its dangerous, even for me. This selfish behavior has to stop.
Or specifically, not "speeding will kill someone" because we'll always have some level of accidents. But increased speed translates to increased accidents and increased accidents translate to more deaths.
Except if you do get hurt, and even if it is just you, the rest of us are, via social contract, obligated to spend common resources to come rescue you and pay for your medical bills. I know you could make this argument against any activity like rock climbing, but then lobby your government.
Even if I grant the response I’m expecting, I dont want to be saved or helped if I injure myself, one, bullshit. Two, even if that’s true, we still have to pay someone to come hose blood off the pavement and dispose of the wreck.
No you aren't. EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act of 1986 specifically says everyone will be treated regardless of any ability to pay.
If someone doesn't have the ability to pay, guess who ends up paying? Everyone else.
Not having the ability to pay doesn't mean you aren't responsible. If you do have the ability to pay, and you are required to have insurance that gives you that ability to pay, then you are responsible.
This driver was probably only doing a few MPH over the 40MPH limit which is quite fast enough for a rural road. There is an A-road alternative for those 'in a hurry' but such carnage is a regular occurance.
I actually used to live near there and have driven down that road numerous times.
* @7pm in the morning in the winter the whole area can be fogged up and it was dark. I've driven down and cycled down there when it wouldn't have been safe doing 15mph.
* Animals can be hard to see, even in good conditions. Especially the donkeys, they are grey, on a black road and the sky is normally grey in England. Many of the animals there have high-vis collars to make them more visible at night.
* It depends what section of the road. In one section of that road the visibility is excellent (when there isn't fog). In another stretch even in the summer,
the visibility is weird due to much of the road being in partial shade due to the trees.
* Drivers go much faster than the 40mph limit in that area almost all the time, especially on the high visibility parts. It doesn't help that if you come off the M25/A31 you would have been going about 70mph and so doing 40mph makes it feels so slow that you can step out of the car.
* The three A-roads near are either blocked due to heavy traffic especially in the summer (infrastructure in general is a joke in Hampshire and Dorset) or they don't go where you want.
I agree visibility can be poor but is easilly mitigated by driving at a suitable speed. The only problem, of course, is other drivers behind getting frustrated and overtaking recklessly. The other day one person was so determined to pass me that he almost hit a car coming in the other direction. For all that he arrived in Fordingbridge (2 miles further on) literally 3 seconds before I did.
> I agree visibility can be poor but is easilly mitigated by driving at a suitable speed.
Not at all. I've been driving at what seems like a sensible speed for the conditions and suddenly there is a deer right in front of my car. You cannot see some of the animals until you are right on top of them.
The fact is that there is too much traffic, there is insufficient infrastructure (and you probably can't add a lot because you will spoil the place) and there are animals freely roaming around. It is recipe of animal deaths in that area.
I dunno what the answer is. Paying the police to put up another gatso van isn't going to solve it though.
Yes, I suppose there are extremes and I've had a similar experience although, regarding the original link, I find it difficult to believe it possible to kill 3 donkeys in one go by driving at a sensible speed in such circumstances?
I've heard this argument before a lot, but I imagine it doesn't actually apply. Although the likelihood of harming another is reduced by the fact that it's night and there are fewer people around, the likelihood is increased by (1) reduced visibility for both drivers and pedestrians, (2) likely reduced mental clarity due to the fact that it's late, (3) both pedestrians and drivers behaving more carelessly because they think there is a reduced chance of risk as a result of sparsity (meta, eh?). My guess would be that accidents are equally likely if not more likely at night as a result, so folks should be prudent at night.
It’s habit.
If you learn to flaunt the law half the time, you could inadvertently break it at a time of day when it could have dire consequences.
Best to be vigilant and cautious at all times for everyone’s benefit.
There’s lots of racetracks and race day Sundays to get your lead foot some action.
> i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?
Yes, the stats show quite clearly that 30mph is the point where pedestrian fatality rates really start climbing. [1]
At 30mph, if you have a collision with a pedestrian there’s a 20% chance the pedestrian dies.
At 35mph it’s 50%
At 40mph it’s 90%
The article mentioned the car was doing over 35mph. Additionally in the U.K. 30mph zones are normally residential areas and city centres, places where pedestrians are very common.
The point is that whilst the danger of a collision goes up as speed increases, you're not considering the context - the conditions. It is unquestionably more dangerous to drive past a school at 8:30am on a weekday at 30mph than it is to drive in that same area at 2am on a Monday morning at 35mph.
If we're talking about safety, then the speed limits should be to reflect conditions, but instead what happens is we cap the limit at the lowest value considering worst conditions.
Realistically the way we deal with this is through selective enforcement, the police probably aren't going to give you a ticket for 35 in a 30 at 2am on a monday morning, but it's silly to pretend that conditions don't matter.
I seriously recommend you follow Surrey Traffic Police, who give some gruelling details of the effects of what people think is “safe” speeding: https://twitter.com/surreyroadcops?s=21
There’s a number of police Twitter accounts that you can follow in this theme to learn more.
Traffic stops in the US are a convenient bypass to the fourth amendment. Split traffic responsibilities from regular cops and people would be willing to be more acceptable of reasonable enforcement.
Whatever employee union that would represent those workers would inevitably start demanding they be issued firearms (at least in the US) due to the legitimate fear of an armed populace, leading to more guns on the streets and more opportunities for deadly violence to break out in a second's notice.
Maybe more enforcement isn't the solution? Traffic stops are far more common in the US than the UK, but the US has far higher road deaths, even when you adjust for the fact that Americans spend more time travelling by road. Maybe the cause of America's excess road deaths is something else?
The US has terrible infrastructure (in many parts of the US you can find a 50mph multi-lane road in a plane 4-way intersection to another similar road, where a sleeping or drunk driver might just sped through a red light and T-bone someone!).
Infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians is often bad.
There is also no zero acceptance for drunk driving. You see people drive to restaurants, have a glass of wine or two, then drive home. Unimaginable.
It’s reasonable to believe the death rate is too high and there is too much enforcement if that enforcement focuses too heavily on a single aspect of the problem at the expense of focusing on other problem areas.
Speed enforcement seems to be the low hanging fruit. There’s (generally) no judgment call, readily accepted evidence, it’s politically palatable, and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: there’s always someone you can tag.
It’s a lot harder to tag someone for driving onto the freeway at 30 mph and failing to merge properly. There’s no “merge trap” to witness it so the cop has to basically happen upon it. There’s not always clear evidence, there’s probably some judgment required too. People don’t like the idea of tickets for going “too slow”; everyone acts like it is absurd. You can’t even blame the LEO because he probably knows the ticket won’t stick. Yet this behavior is extremely dangerous and happens all the time.
Yet surpising how infrequently you see the 20mph being adhered to. These people, already travelling very short distances, must be saving at least 30 seconds a year?
20/35 is 4/7 the speed, and therefore it makes every trip take 7/4 as long. So you spend an additional 15 minutes on every 20-minute journey. You're rapidly going to waste more human lifetimes sitting in cars than you would ever save from driving slower.
The number of people who justify driving as fast as possible to "save time" and then waste lots of time on other pointless activities is quite incredible. It's almost as if they're not really concerned about time at all...
First, the existence of hypocrites and irrational people is not a counterargument to appeals for efficiency.
Second, those pointless activities are what we're saving time for. I want to get more work done, and retire sooner, just so that I have more time for my pointless activities. People who don't begrudge every minute they spend in a car, in my view, are failing to maximize the leisure time that should be their chief goal in life.
Until you can donate someone your time, that's not how it works. This take is "my 5 min is so important, I'm willing to risk someone's 60 years" (scaled to thousands of people).
You can also make other choices that reduce your 15min to begin with. (If the small difference there makes important changes in your life)
I don't need to donate them my time, they are also saving the same 15 minutes per trip. Do I also have to invent time donation to propose other time-savers like dishwashers?
> "my 5 min is so important, I'm willing to risk someone's 60 years" (scaled to thousands of people).
The scaling matters! Boston has 1.8 million drivers losing 150 hours in traffic per year, according to https://inrix.com/press-releases/2019-traffic-scorecard-us/. Imagine that all of that traffic was caused by our desire to save a single human baby. 270 million hours lost to save 700,000. Would you agree that's not worth it? That probably those 270 million hours would produce enough economic output to save a different baby instead?
To me, a 75% increase in travel time is high enough and 35 mph is slow enough that I think everyone's 15 minutes is, in fact, worth risking someone's 60 years, once every couple of years. I could be proved wrong about the math, but it seems to me it's mostly an argument about risk tolerance.
Correct, assuming a perfectly spherical car on a frictionless road with no other traffic, hazards, or traffic controls.
In the real world 20mph puts a cap on your top speed only in the few instances you could possibly go that fast. Factor in lights, queueing at rotaries, slowing for emerging traffic, slowing for and then going around cyclists... ad nauseam
It is measured though! City hall & TRL track this. In outer London the average traffic speed overall is about 20mph. In inner London it’s about 12 and 8 in the centre. I don’t think the 20mph limit makes a real difference to journey times, but it does make the streets safer especially for people not in cars.
I wonder what is the effect on climate change? Are we killing the planet by doing this? Should we instead up the speeds to closer of where cars are most efficient? Also need to remember that each fatality is good for environment...
Around 45 mph is the most efficient speed for a car engine last I checked -- they always tell you to slow down to save gas, but never to speed up. I feel that shows their real agenda is more about limiting speed than efficiency.
> For example, as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves.
What an absurd comment. Scotland has stricter drink-driving laws than England.
> As a free person I think you need to have the right to make bad decisions and accept their consequences, as long as those do not impact others.
Peak Libertarian fantasy to think this should apply here. Unfortunately, the real world is never so ordered and predictable that you can know for certain whether the country road you're about to speed on is completely empty. Just like you, the rest of us have the right to use that road as well whenever we please.
Even if you were the sole victim in such an accident, you're ignoring all the second order societal costs. Who will pay for the police time spent investigating the accident, delivering the news to your loved ones, and the cost of bereavement leave on their employers? Who's going to pay for removing the wreck and fixing whatever infrastructure (e.g. the road surface) you might have damaged? What about the mental health effects on the unfortunate neighbour who discovers your mangled corpse? And if you're only injured, how about the costs of an ambulance and medical treatment? We don't all live in the USA where that is (supposedly) borne by the individual.
Whether you like them or not, speed limits exist for good reasons.
> doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?
Demonstrably yes. Check out this study by the UK's Transport Research Laboratory. The chances of killing a pedestrian rise dramatically from around 10% at 30mph. The likelihood roughly doubles at 35mph. Remember that kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, not linearly, so even small increases in speed can have dramatic effects on accident outcomes: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
James May must be really happy now. This means the "rozzers" have solved all the existing crimes and are now focusing on petty things like this. James must have gotten his telly back too!
Its a fair point though. They couldn’t even be bothered to look into my Dads stolen boat engine because it was only worth £10,000 - even though he had a pretty good lead about the organized outfit that did it.
I mean, does anyone really think these cameras and fines are really to ensure public safety? Seems more like taxation and fear mongering.
If the UK police are anything like the US, they don’t care about theft even if you have a solid lead and evidence. Theft reporting is purely for statistics.
The UK police are not like the US. They aren't very well funded, and they police by consent rather than shooting people (They probably would do more, but you have to realise that in many parts of the UK we don't see police even driving about let alone on the beat i.e. fear mongering)
All modern police forces are modelled to some extent on Robert Peel's ideas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles). That includes to some extent the US police as well. The notion that US police just go around slinging guns around like some gun toting cowboys (while it does happen) is propaganda.
The police in the UK can be just as corrupt and inept. However there is a need for armed police in the UK. Just go to live leak or any of the clip sites and you can find all the videos where there are 10 officers trying to take down one maniac with a machete on a council estate with harsh language and pepper spray.
My brother's car was destroyed on the side of the road in a hit and run incident and even after finding the uninsured car that did it via friends in the know the police wouldn't do anything at all.
Just like most organisations common sense is gone and it's all about following regular protocols etc.
Hahaha.. Thank you. James May is a legend. Even though he is friends with two petrol heads, he owns a Tesla and a Toyota Mirai. He has an open mind towards futuristic technologies. I like watching anything by James May. Seems like a good bloke. For some reason he doesn't like the French! :D
There’s too much focus on the easy to measure speed problem. I’m not saying inappropriate speed should not be enforced against but i strongly believe more effort should be applied to avoid the more common cause of major road traffic incidents - inattention.
You can’t easily measure inattention but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
The solution doesn’t only have to be in penalties, it could be in making it harder to be inattentive to begin with.
That said, this is all low priority stuff in the UK. In the UK today there are basically zero road traffic police, you are exceedingly unlikely to come across any. Their numbers have been cut relentlessly as miles driven have increased. And yet... road deaths are down over the same 20 years and mobility is up.
Road traffic enforcement isn’t even in the top 1000 issues facing the UK today.
Inattention is hard to measure and results in accidents that are made much worse by excessive speed, which is easy to measure. If the goal is to reduce overall traffic victims, then investing in speed control seems like the low hanging fruit.
The energy of vehicle (thus, the energy absorbed during impact by every object contained or hit) is proportinal with the square of the speed. Meanwhile, the reaction time available to avoid the collision drops linearly with speed, while the braking or turn distance increases more than linearly.
So the overall probability of accidents and their severity increases exponentially with speed.
The problem is that naive arguments about speed and laws based on fixed numbers don't really help anything except ease of prosecution. Inappropriate choice of speed can obviously be dangerous, but what is appropriate to the conditions and what the fixed numerical speed limits dictate can be wildly different.
For example, the default speed limit in the UK on most residential roads is 30mph, but if you drive past a school at 30mph at the end of the afternoon when the kids are coming out and there are lots parked cars obscuring your view, that is still inappropriately fast for the conditions.
However, slower isn't always safer. On a motorway, the speed limit is usually 70mph, but in poor weather conditions and heavy traffic, everyone travelling at lower and similar speeds may be the safest choice. If you're the one driver insisting on unnecessarily doing 20mph when everyone else is doing a steady 40mph, you're also increasing the danger to yourself and others.
Another example is that the speed limit for heavy goods vehicles on many of our major roads was increased by 10mph in 2015, having previously been 20mph below what cars were allowed to do on the same roads. The results were notable for several reasons, among them that the actual average speed of those heavy vehicles only increased a little but the safety of the roads appears to have increased. This was attributed primarily to closing the gap in speeds between different types of vehicle and thus, among other things, reducing instances of queues behind and overtaking of the slower vehicles, both of which increase the risk of an accident.
Finally, we have the classic motorway speeding situation, where on an open road in good conditions, a competent driver with a suitable vehicle could do far more than the legal limit of 70mph with negligible increase in risk. Moreover, statistically our motorways are both our fastest roads and yet also among our safest. You could certainly print money by setting up a covert speed camera watching some stretches of motorway, but whether it is a good use of police resources if your objective is to increase road safety is a different question.
>> results in accidents that are made much worse by excessive speed
Sure but there's no free lunch here. If you trade off speed in the non-accident cases, which is by far the majority of all miles driven, then there's a cost to that.
It happens to be a really hard to measure cost so it's always completely ignored. How would you even begin to measure the cost to the nation of traffic arriving 5 minutes later? Not all 5 minute delays are equal, e.g the cost of delay to an ambulance rushing to hospital is different to the increased cost of delivering packages.
>> the reaction time available
In fairness, you could make the reaction time measurable in hours and it'd be insufficient to prevent some inattention caused road incidents.
Another problem with only looking at speed is the unintended consequence of drivers de-rating the risks. E.g. if a vehicle was limited to 5mph, this as you know is slow enough to be fairly unlikely to cause a pedestrian death even if there is an impact, it would have the un-wanted effect that some drivers would view the risks as lower and would be inclined to engage in more risky behaviours, e.g. taking their eyes off the road to turn around and argue with a child in the back seat where in 20mph traffic they might choose instead to just speak to the child.
>> So the overall probability of accidents
No that doesn't hold. We don't have more accidents on the fastest roads in the UK.
> the cost to the nation of traffic arriving 5 minutes later?
Traffic delays are dominated by congestion and road capacity does not increase with higher speeds. Once you hit the peak for that road section, trafic grinds. If, for example, you have a 30 minute comute that spends 15 minutes in congestion-limited trafic and 15 minutes on a speed limited empty highway, you would need to drive 50% faster on those sections to recoup a full 5 minutes, so something like 105 mph on a 70 mph section for a full 10 minutes. That doesn't sound realistic.
There is a cost to low speed limits, clearly, but it is usually marginal - and when it's not, you should address that specific problem of a too low speed limit instead of making speed limits unenforceable throughout. If a section generates lots of speed tickets and no even minor incidents, it's clearly a sign to increase speed.
> drivers de-rating the risks.
True, but the risk rating they assigned to higher speeds was probably not proportional to the actual exponential increase to begin with.
> We don't have more accidents on the fastest roads in the UK.
That's moving the goal posts. The increase in risk is exponential on any given single road. Some roads are exceptionally safe at low speeds so you can increase the speed quite a bit and keep the risks low, hence the higher limits.
>> road capacity does not increase with higher speeds
Fundamentally untrue. If you reduce the average speed of a section of road, say for example in heavy rain, the capacity or throughput of that section of road is reduced since less vehicles can pass through in the same time.
If you can keep drivers attentive enough to maintain safe distance between vehicles, you can increase the speed of a section of road.
>> Once you hit the peak for that road section
You can increase the practical peak in an imperfect world by increasing attentiveness of drivers.
For example, you could defer the onset of gridlock by X minutes by making more efficient use of the available road space. In some cases it will be possible to increase X such that gridlock is never encountered for the same traffic volume.
>> Some roads are exceptionally safe at low speeds
And yet the focus on speed means that roads which are not exceptionally safe at low speed have reduced incentive to be improved. Why improve a road (hard in some cases) when the impact is not measurable and speed is an easy band aid.
Better to pretend the immeasurable doesn’t exist and simply focus on speed. Even if other approaches could have a greater impact on road safety.
The capacity of a sufficiently long road section does not increase with speed because the safety distance must also increase with speed. A good rule of thumb is to keep a 2 second (or 3 second) distance between vehicles, and that means that the peak throughput of any single lane is 0.33-0.5 vehicles per second regardless of speed.
The total time spent on the road increases and the utility of the road decreases since it gets you to your destination slower, but the capacity does not increase, it's the same capacity with an added delay line. In fact, the safety distance increases more than linearly with speed, precisely because the combined effect of reaction time, braking distance and severity of incidents is more than linear. The 2 second rule is just a rough approximation.
These are really "fundamentally true" issues that are well known in traffic engineering so there is nothing much to debate. The rain example is disingenuous since in rain the braking distance increases dramatically, drivers instinctively know this and maintain larger clearances. And the demand of the car traffic increases too in bad weather, for example people avoid using bicycles or walking and opt for a car, which injects additional vehicles into a road network and pushes it over into disequilibrium and gridlock.
>> The capacity of a sufficiently long road section does not increase with speed
Most roads aren't sufficiently long and there's plenty of other factors and practical road usage is nowhere near this perfect maximum of safe usage but to point out your mathematical error:
For 10 minutes a section of road 1 mile long has traffic pass through it. The cars have 3 second gaps between them.
At 30 mph: 160 cars max throughput
At 60 mph: 180 cars max throughput
In the 30mph example, for the first 2 minutes, 0 cars have completed the 1 mile stretch, for the period 2-10 mins, cars pass the finishing line every 3 seconds. 160 cars complete the 1 mile stretch in 10 mins.
In the 60mph example, only the 1st minute is spent without traffic completing the throughput analysis. For the period 1-10 mins, cars pass the finishing line every 3 seconds. 180 cars complete the 1 mile stretch in 10 mins.
Yes, you need to double the speed and construct an artificial trafic burst to notice a marginal increase in capacity that is strictly due to the increased delay (and storage capacity) of the slower road. That was my point. In practice trafic ramps up slow enough so that we can ignore the lost capacity due to empty roads in the early hours. After that, it is steady state for both scenarios.
> there's plenty of other factors and practical road usage is nowhere near this perfect maximum of safe usage
Precisely, but this even further argues against high speed limits. If the road tends to be congested, windy, has trafic lights and is poorly maintained, the areas where you can increase the speeds are very limited and the total impact in trip time is low. So high speeds not only not deliver higher throughputs but they fail to even deliver speed.
It has not been all that long that we had technologies we could put into cars to determine if a driver was paying attention; though exactly what that is is also subject to interpretation
With my Tesla I am able to have it chime if I exceed the speed limit by a set amount and even if a light turns green.
however the big danger is still cell phone usage and no one wants to take the step of disabling them while moving and the technology is there.
>> however the big danger is still cell phone usage
There’s more than just cell phone usage. Inattention comes in many forms and none of them is better or worse than the others.
Drivers paying more attention to the radio show they’re listening to while gently zoning out to the traffic conditions around them - this is really common on long motorway journeys.
Drivers fizzing with rage at the argument they just had before getting in the car.
What’s the bigger issue: road traffic enforcement or avoiding pedestrian deaths by finding acceptable ways to remove vehicles altogether from pedestrian areas?
Road traffic enforcement or reducing infant asthma in cities by moving tailpipe emissions away from populated areas?
Road traffic enforcement or ... you get the point.
Well what are you suggesting then? I think enforcing the traffic laws we have is one of the low-hanging fruit for cutting the huge rate of deaths from traffic collisions. Are you proposing something concrete that would be better to spend our time on, or just finding an excuse to do nothing?
Every death should be avoided which should go without saying but this is the internet...
>> huge rate
We don't have huge rates compared to other countries - we're usually in the top 3 major developed countries every year for almost a decade at this point. We also don't have huge rates compared to other causes, e.g. there are under 2,000 road deaths each year but suicides top 6,500 per year.
>> Are you proposing something concrete that would be better to spend our time on
Yes - the solution for 0 road deaths does not exist purely in speed. Further, focussing only on speed has detrimental cost to the country. It's impossible to measure this cost so people ignore it. It is not sound methodology to ignore something simply because it can't be measured.
As i stated upfront, enforcement of inappropriate speed should not be stopped, however, the biggest cause of road fatalaties - inattention - should now become a priority for enforcement.
There is no technical gizmo available today for this therefore this means simply investing in more traffic police. No more complicated than that. I would expect though that some budget diverted from speed enforcement (which is a cost activity to the country despite the revenue it generates) would also be directed to figuring out more efficient ways of enforcing inattention. As i also said up front - this doesn't have to be in penalties, it might be better invested in making it less likely for drivers to be inattentive.
A guy's car had issues and pulled over on a high way, police remotely helped him dialing the tow truck company, via speed cameras and a loud speaker.
The best part? The police was able to look at his phone screen clearly and yield over the speaker "no dude you got the third digit wrong with the phone number!!!"
I think society will soon discover that a certain % of rule breaking is absolutely necessary for it to function.
My car has a speed limiter, radio and a computer. Imagine a near future where speed limits are sent via radio then enforced by the car computer. No more infringement!
> If a law is bad when enforced, then the law needs to be changed, not the enforcement.
Useful as a rule of thumb but it's not always true. Models are never perfect, the map is not the territory. We are constantly figuring out what our shared values are, and it's a moving target. And the body of law itself is a complex beast with its own surprising dynamics. It's part of an ecosystem. You can't wave away its complexity with such a simplistic ideal.
A given law may be 'bad' (regrettable, even draconian/immoral) when enforced in certain cases, and yet it may also be unfeasible to change that law to add those cases as exceptions. This is why the law gives judges flexibility on sentencing, for example.
In practice, it really never happens that we make the law more permissive through a deliberative process and then start doing the thing. We relax the law because we found that people didn't really respect it and enforcement was unpopular.
And then we only enforce it on people we don't like and can use it as an excuse and everyone will go "yeah, well, I mean, it is a law, after all. They should have known better. Everyone gets caught eventually."
I think the concern is not so much a desire for arbitrary enforcement as it is a fear of perfect enforcement at all times. I think some degree of freedom is a fundamental need of the human being, even from the rules we set for ourselves. We don't actually want all of our laws to be perfectly enforced all of the time, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the laws themselves are unlikely to ever be perfect, even if perfect enforcement leads to more scrutiny and tweaking.
perfect enforcement sounds like it could be a great way to combat racism and other bias a police officer might have. laws being enforced imperfectly creates a class divide since the upper class won't feel the impact of bad laws on their communities.
> Imagine a near future where speed limits are sent via radio then enforced by the car computer.
I think if a law were passed that forced people to adopt that, there would be a backlash, and then the speed limits would very quickly be increased as well — to a far more reasonable level. I would imagine highway speed limits would rise to 110 mph (177 kmph) or something, which is far more reasonable considering how safe cars are today, and the sheer number of hours it would save in commuting times.
(If a road heavily used by commuters changed its speed limit from 55 mph to 110 mph, you’d be cutting each person’s commute time by up to half. That would add up to million of hours of time saved in a large-ish city, and not to mention, less road damage due to the lower amount of time cars are on the road, and probably less energy usage once car manufacturers optimize their engines/motors for maximum efficiency at the 110 mph point.)
The less visibility police personally have on the car they're doing the reading on (e.g. half-mile away & at night), the less they're capable of introducing human bias (e.g. profiling) into who they scan and who they don't.
Seems like a win-win for enforcing the law and doing so equally on everyone.
Why isn't the method used to find those places also subject to bias?
Widespread speed enforcement needs to be almost algorithmic in it's spread. And that algorithm would have to be closely watched. Saying "put a speed camera at every stop light" would heavily police urban centers for example, but essentially exclude wealthy communities that sprawl out with miles of stop signs between multi-acre properties
To the people downvoting this: this is the U.K. law in this area. If you weren’t the driver, you must tell the police who was driving. If you don’t, you’re the one who gets the speeding ticket.
Brexit will put the kabosh on much of that I imagine. When the borders are closed to the rest of Europe it will be quite easy to make cars from unfriendly jurisdictions illegal on UK roads or to require the equivalent of a visa to bring a car registered in one of those uncooperative nations into the country.
Even without Brexit it is illegal for a British resident to drive a foreign-registered car on British roads. Though the law is rarely enforced, it does exist. Many EU countries have similar laws- and yes, they do apply to cars registered in other EU countries.
Actually banning foreign-registered cars driven by non-residents from the roads would require withdrawing from international conventions that long predate the EU, and result in British tourists abroad not being able to drive a rental car until they pass a local driving test...
> Even without Brexit it is illegal for a British resident to drive a foreign-registered car on British roads. Though the law is rarely enforced, it does exist.
-Norway has a similar law, with the interesting application that if you, a Norwegian resident, is caught driving a car registered abroad in Norway, you're on the hook for the import taxes which would apply if the car were to be put on Norwegian plates.
In a way this makes sense, as (fossil) cars are taxed to high heaven and then some, doubly so if they are well-powered. If the law didn't exist, everyone wanting a muscle car would just buy it in Sweden at half the cost.
I was waiting for a response to post this organisation, which definitely has the ear of a number of seemingly influential MPs in this country: https://twitter.com/theabd
There was a case in the UK recently where a cyclist was knocked off their bike. Both the owner of the car and their partner claimed the other was driving and in the end they got away with it.
I find it odd that there is so much emphasis on enforcement of speed limits. Studies have shown that speed limits above and below the prevailing speed of most drivers is a much higher risk factor that raw speed. And then there are other behaviors such as using a cell phone and driving that may be criminalized, but do not seem to receive such fervent enforcement.
Some of it is due to how easily speed can be measured but you're over-simplifying what the studies actually show. Speed is what turns minor accidents into major ones, especially for people who aren't themselves in cars[1] so while it's true that for avoiding vehicular collisions the most important factor is going around the same speed as the rest of the vehicles there's still a significant difference in injury/death rates for anything which isn't a protected highway. As a parent, I think about this a lot when I see people going 45+ MPH (>80% death rate) in the 20mph zone in front of the closest playground where a kid was killed a while back by someone who couldn't stop in time. An aggravating factor here is that drivers now are often quite distracted by touchscreen controls and phones so the window for slowing down to avoid hitting someone is even less favorable.
There are some newer cars with AEB that have pedestrian detection, though. You can watch videos of IIHS testing those features [0]. It's not a perfect solution but will automatically brake if a collision with a pedestrian (or other VRU) is predicted and the driver is not braking.
Volvo has developed "large animal" sensors that are designed to avoid collisions with moose at highway speeds. I have no idea how well they actually work in practice however.
Oh, definitely. I’d love to see those become mandatory just like seatbelts, airbags, etc. have because it’s a multi decade process to upgrade the national vehicle fleet.
People who break the law like to say this but I've never lived anywhere where, if that were true, the city wasn't inexplicably leaving tons of money on the table. Usually it's a token effort at addressing safety issues caused by poor road design and an excuse officers like to use to stop someone when they want to search their car.
EDIT: as a thought experiment, imagine that we went full cyberpunk hell-future and they started letting private equity companies put up cameras anywhere some MBA thought their cut of the ticket revenue would pay for the camera. How many speeding/stop sign/red light tickets do you think the average driver would get on their way to work? Now ask how different that is from the average driver's experience almost anywhere.
I don't think it's very common, but you can find places where you can plainly see that's the reason: mainly non-local tourist traffic, poor signage, no other warnings about a dangerous area or speed checks, hidden speed cameras but no police present.
This translates to: we don't care you're not going to drive here again, or that you didn't notice the sign. We don't even care if you slow down or not.
Not being sour here. I got caught at a well signed area in my local neighbourhood area - now I'm driving there slower.
In Russia this is already the thing, private parties are setting their own licensed and verified speed traps.I don't know their revenue numbers, though
Other suggest revenue source; but I think it's simply because it's easiest to enforce and least prone to personal judgement given it's based on strict numerical limits.
Unsafe driving (braking distance, crossing lines, holding a cell phone) should be as good or even better revenue sources, but they are more difficult to enforce automatically. While nowadays there would be tech for implementing that, historically it has not been so, so the momentum of the history is perhaps making advancements slow?
There were some new cameras introduced here some time back which were advertised to be able to have quality sufficient to detect that seat belts and cell phones: but still, pictures were taken only when exceeding the speed limit, so those factors could not be used as the primary source.
not sure why this is downvoted. I have found it quite hard to find good research tying speeding to accidents. the best you get from NHTSA is accidents where speeding "was a factor". the fraction of accidents where speed was a factor is surprisingly low (around 25% IIRC), and I'm pretty sure they count speeding as a "factor" whenever someone happened to be speeding right before the incident.
I'm inclined to think speeding is enforced much more than other traffic offenses merely because it is the easiest to detect.
When allowing for a reasonable margin of error, speeding is also one of the fairer ways of enforcing traffic offenses. Anyone can be inattentive and touch a wheel to the lane line once. If it happens repeatedly, the driver is likely distracted or impaired. but one time can be a simple mistake that doesn't require intervention unless it leads to a crash or other conflict.
A driver exceeding the speed limit by 20%, to throw out a number, isn't likely to do so as a one-off mistake unless he misses a signed change in the speed limit. If exceeding by 20% was a one-off under an unchanged speed limit, it most likely means the driver was already exceeding the speed limit by 10-15% as a matter of course. I am much more comfortable with a driver being cited in this case.
right, but the question is whether speeding is actually that dangerous in the first place. it's not at all clear that absolute speed is a major contributor to the rate of accidents. we do know from physics that relative speed is a major factor in the severity of accidents, and this is supported by the empirical data. in particular, the probability of death when a pedestrian is struck increases sharply past ~20 mph.
I think we could have a much better discussion (and perhaps policy) if we distinguished more clearly between driving near pedestrians and driving on limited-access roads. I'm actually a big fan of speed cameras in cities and other dense areas, since they allow me to drive at what I consider a safe speed (at or below the posted limit) without worrying about cars flying past me at a high relative speed. on US highways, the situation is kind of absurd. I can exceed the posted limit by 50% without coming close to the limit of my car's mechanical grip. if I have a good line of sight and there's minimal traffic, why shouldn't I?
> using a cell phone and driving that may be criminalized, but do not seem to receive such fervent enforcement
It does in Germany, but then again, they regulate how much your dog is allowed to bark in Bavaria. The truth is most new cars have great phone assist, you'd be dumb to use a phone while driving otherwise and it should totally be enforced. Not criminalized, just classified as a misdemeanor.
In Maryland I-270 is capped at 55 mph. However the general flow of traffic is closer to 75 mph. This gives police the ability to turn on the money faucet (speeding tickets) at their whim and leisure which I think is bogus. If 90%+ of cars are going more than 10mph over the limit, it means the limit is way too low.
The problem for me is that they are put at places where people tend to speed, and that is often because it is a major road running through a village. Instead of building the proper infrastructure to allow traffic to pass through we just slow it down.
My second problem with speed enforcement is it has caused a shift in policing. Speeding is an absolute and so is cheap to police and prosecute so gets 100% of the enforcement effort, ignoring tailgating, undertaking, lane hogging, lane indiscipline...etc. All of this can be just as serious, and I feel (as a regular driver of some of the UKs busiest roads) are getting worse. I would much prefer to have a police officer in a car enforcing the rules than any fixed speed camera
>Instead of building the proper infrastructure to allow traffic to pass through we just slow it down.
And then they might build a road hump. So now the nearby residents and pedestrians get a noisier road and anyone on a bike or in a car gets less comfort and less control even while following the speed limit.
Average speed camera zones are the only speed control device that works (for many via congestion rather than willful compliance I suspect), unfortunately it also encourages tailgating, aggressive and distracted driving (often in reduced width lanes) - I wish there was more of a focus on that.
Speed cameras allowed the government to cut back on traffic policing completely, whilst still enforcing something. From memory there are something like 40k fewer police on our little island than before the financial crisis.
My issue with the strict enforcement of speed limits is that safe speed for a given stretch of road varies drastically based on conditions. These would include weather, light level, traffic density, vehicle capabilities and condition, and driver experience and aptitude.
It's not possible to set an optimal speed limit for all these conditions, so normally speed limits are set quite conservatively. Of course it is theoretically a limit, not a target, so you could instead set it closer to the target speed for ideal conditions and expect people to slow in other conditions. That is done in some parts of the world, but not most. And so in somewhat of a causal loop, many drivers therefore consider the speed limit to be a target rather than a maximum, and don't apply a lot of judgement in determining safe speed.
My belief is that (with sufficient time and training to reach a status quo) a system with less strict or no speed limits, and instead a focus on safe driving, would encourage drivers to be more thoughtful and attentive, and result in fewer accidents and possibly even fewer injuries and fatalities. This could include design elements such as traffic calming where appropriate to encourage an appropriate speed without using conservative speed limits. Perhaps an increase in consequences for at-fault collisions would make sense in conjunction as well.
I do recall seeing some evidence that increasing or removing speed limits can reduce collisions, although perhaps not fatal ones. On the other hand, I can certainly understand if one did believe that lower speed limits save lives, one could argue it's better to over-enforce the limits and risk wasting people's time than under-enforce them and risk wasting lives. Also any increase in legal subjectivity increases the risk of unfair enforcement. So I don't think there's necessarily an obvious best approach.
The U.K. does have variable speed limits on most major motorways that change with conditions, congestion etc, with LED signs that display the current speed limit.
Smart motorways only adjust the speed limit down, and when there is no speed displayed then there are speed cameras every .5 miles or so enforcing 70mph
Smart motorways will readily adjust the speed limit down (often for no discernible reason), but they don't increase the speed limit were it may be appropriate e.g. good weather and very limited number of vehicles on the road.
Your post seems to imply that the reason 80mph isn't the limit is because of safety, but actually the governments main reasoning for not moving up to 80mph when this was last reviewed was actually about emissions rather than safety (last debated in 2011).
I think you're being overly optimistic regarding human behaviour, I'm doubtful more training will massively change how reckless people will be. That's not to say I'm against the idea
I'd be interested to see the evidence removing limits reduces accidents, I should imagine there'd be lots of data for roads that have had their speed limits reduced.
I have a dashcam with GPS because I want to be able to prove that I have not been speeding or taking in handheld device etc. if stopped or photographed. The dashcam video shows current speed from GPS. I usually drive the speed limit where it makes sense. The speed traps here in DK are placed in easily guessable locations and mostly avoided. The chance to get caught by the traffic police is very low in my opinion - 130 km/h zones on highways are not policed according to my experiences.
No info about the tech in this article, but from the video I guess it's just a very long telephoto lens? No fancy letter-detection radar algorithms or anything like that?
It is likely a more powerful LIDAR, a laser with a very narrow beam width (but weak enough to not affect eyesight). Combine this with retroreflective paint on the license/number plate to get both speed and the number.
Here is some info about building a lidar detector.
Everyone travels with a personal tracking device, except for those who choose to opt out of modern society, what you present as a future threat can be easily done today with little effort by law enforcement.
It's trivial to determine the speed a person travels down a highway from GSM timing advance data. In most countries on Earth this metadata is mandated to be held for a certain amount of time by service providers.
Like all laws, it's selective, and there's only so many prosecutors, the moment they even try to charge the first person is when that government mandated tracking device in your pocket starts losing its value.
Average speed control. For every trip... Sounds doable already. Ofc, privacy implications are really fun when they start selling journey data of each car...
Now add facial recognition in mix on from CCTVs. And we are in whole new level of tracking everyone. Coming soon!
They already have (and have had for decades) the equivalent of "speed enforced by aircraft patrol" where they spot from a plane and ticket by car; they could do the same thing with satellites...
I’ve been waiting for someone to build an RTL-SDR detector for those. They draw fun loops over the highway because highway speeds are a little too close to stall speed.
Reality is it’s just an expensive enforcement stunt.
What doesn't make sense to me is why can most cars go so much faster than any speed limits?
Why not just have the manufacturers build slower cars, or at least limit them somehow. Then make it ilegal for people to tamper with their cars to make them faster.
Is there any other reason than playing this game in which law enforcement/governments get to make additional money through tickets?
from an engineering perspective, it is hard to design a car that can safely travel at 60 mph and accelerate to that speed in a timely fashion without giving it the ability to go much faster. a car with a drag-limited top speed of 60 mph would become a road hazard any time it merged onto a freeway.
it's possible to program a car to cut the throttle when it hits a certain speed, but most people take a dim view of having objects that they own be programmed to disobey them. would you like to use an OS that prevents you from installing any software that could enable illicit activity?
I'd love to see some data that can tell if speeding to the hospital (by random people, not by a trained ambulance driver) has a net positive effect on the outcome of the patients, as well as what the risk of car accidents happening as a result of the speeding.
I also wonder if maybe by forcing cars to go slower we could: 1) reduce car accidents by a lot and 2) reduce current spend on emergency response by a big enough amount that could then allow to use it to cover faster response times (e.g. sending a helicopter)
Indeed, it wouldn’t be speeding that would get you to a hospital many minutes faster; it would be judicious disregard for red lights and centre markings—much like ambulance drivers normally do by virtue of their sirens and lights.
Speeding doesn’t save nearly as much clock time as it feels like it does, especially if you’re regularly blocked in by other cars and traffic signals.
Speeding might get you through the lights before they turn red, though. A bad luck red sequence might altogether be avoided with some speeding. You might include "old green" in this as well, different regions have a different time from you getting red to others getting green.
Red lights themselves could often be somewhat safely ran through with some attention and a fast-accelerating vehicle—slow down first, check directions, etc. Preferably in particularly paying attention to pedestrians..
If it could be made 100% reliable I’d be happy to have a car restricted to (say) 30% over the limit. That would reduce crazy people doing 90km/h in 30 zones etc.
But it wouldn’t be perfect, more likely it would occasionally pick up the 30 zone on the parallel street and limit my speed to 40 in the 90 road. No thanks. I don’t think it’s a solvable problem in the short term.
In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit.
If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding. Yes, the bill goes to the car owner, but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes. It is reasonable to place requirements on the determination of speed-limits and camera-locations to prevent abuse. Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.